On Writing
I grew up a cynic, someone full of piss and vinegar in the face of all authority that presumed to tell me what to do. This is likely due to my upbringing. I came to learn in my teenage years the lesson that comes to us all eventually, the disillusionment that adults don't know much better about the world than children do. Like so many of us, my strategy to cope with this uncomfortable truth was to reject anything bestowed upon me by those in charge, or outright rebel against it when it was too insistent that I comply. To teenage me, an individual identity meant forging my set of knowledge at the behest of no one else, coupled awkwardly with whatever I had to learn to get passing grades.
I derive little authority from my own experience that entitles me to comment on the art of writing, because I have done precious little of it, and what little I have done is a dim memory from several lifetimes ago. I grew up with a secret longing to be a writer, a dream that did not last long once I ended up in college and was facing the specter of what it means to be an adult in the world. That has essentially left me with a vocabulary that I use in my day-to-day life that makes me come across as pretentious, and the slow accretion in my head of several novels that I tell myself I "might write someday". The reader would do well to bear this in mind, and understand that I write here for the same reason that many teachers end up in their chosen profession: those who teach often learn more than their students, and so I write here, under the guise of offering instruction to others, with the not-so-secret agenda of ultimately instructing myself.
In some measure, the maturity of a person comes with the gradual dissolution of the doctrinaire rule that nothing can be learned from our forebears. The wealth of knowledge from the geniuses of the past is often obscured by the pettiness and shortcomings of those who might teach it to us. For me, this veil was punctured initially by a conversation I had with my mother when I was around 30 years of age. Knowing that she had studied English literature when she was in college, I asked her what she thought about Shakespeare. To my surprise, she responded dismissively, saying that Shakespeare and his works had only survived to the present day because English teachers insist on teaching him, year after year, generation after generation, and that he was a naked emperor with no inherent artistic merit. When someone devotes their academic life to a particular subject, I don't expect them to love everything related to their major, but I generally expect that they're able to find at least one dimension of merit to anything that might pertain to their field of study. In any case, I took it as a potential clue about the origins of my own cynical attitude.
What started to draw back the veil entirely was the ending of the television show "Breaking Bad". This was an ending that I connected with emotionally, quite strongly, and one that satisfied me. It seems that this was an almost universal reaction, both from casual viewers and those who make a living criticizing such things. In the wake of this, I was struck by a desire to figure out why. Why, exactly, had the conclusion of this story, which was a rather dark morality tale about an everyman who becomes a drug lord, been so satisfying to so many people?
My seeking took me to Aristotle's Poetics, and his formula for what makes a good tragedy. They are elements that are known to just about every high school student. Tragedy is characterized by suffering, but it must also be due to the hamartia (fatal flaw) of the protagonist and not merely by unfortunate circumstances. In the case of the character of Walter White, there is the desire for wealth, ostensibly for benevolent reasons. The climax of the story is precipitated by a peripeteia, a reversal of circumstances, where Walt loses his family and much of his fortune due to his own avarice. While in exile, at the end of penultimate episode, he sees colleagues from a past life on Charlie Rose, and his reaction what they say about him on TV is clearly the moment of anagnorisis (recognition), in which he comes to understand his own motives, and that he is not, as previously believed, the hero in his own story. We learn this from his confession to his wife in the series finale, in which he finally admits that he acted out of self-interest, with the rationalization that he was trying to support his family. There is catharsis in this, provided that the narrative has maintained a protagonist sympathetic to the viewer, because the audience can imagine themselves committing the same error. Such is the essence of the tragic hero. (As I write on the brink of the final season of "Better Call Saul", I have spent a fair amount of time musing on how these elements might be used to construct an ending for the character of Saul Goodman. My best guess: the arrival of the settlement money from the Sandpiper Crossing lawsuit will tempt "Gene" to return to Albuquerque and lead to his own tragic end.)
Despite the abundance of five-dollar words in the preceding paragraph, they don't mean much more to me now than when I first forgot them after high school English class. Understanding them intellectually is one thing, but it is another thing entirely to be able to paint a narrative that employs them and manages to successfully elicit the desired emotional effect. In any case, the ending of "Breaking Bad" changed my whole way of looking at the world, and forced perspective about how my way of living might be affecting those around me. Upon learning that ancient Greek philosophy outlined the structure of such a psychologically transformative crime drama presented as a television series finally drilled it into my skull that our ancestors might be able to teach us something useful.
I've realized in the last year or so that my ideas for stories, and the characters that inhabit them, are usually a means of exorcising my own demons. In college, I wrote a novella, which I constructed in my head over the course of one fall semester, and which I pounded out into a computer during finals week in December, a week during which I did little more than drink copious amounts of liquor, write this book, and somehow manage to ace all my final exams. (I slept the week after.) The book itself is about a college student living life as an alienated paraphiliac who, failing to figure out his future or how he fits into the world, decides to go on a hedonistic sexual assault bender one evening, a final bang that will punctuate his life with, if nothing else, a sense of biological fulfillment. Apart from the alienation of the central character, I had little directly in common with the central character, and was instead trying to write a story to help my 20-year-old self, who was developmentally stunted at the mental age of 12, make sense of the chaotic and contradictory adult world into which I had recently been plunged and was struggling to integrate myself. I did this by attempting to write the most disturbing, unsettling thing I possibly could, by exploring all of the ugliest aspects of human nature via the most abhorrent manifestations of our sexuality. (I did not actually include the more graphic scenes in the narrative, instead allowing them to happen "off camera"; I was trying to be subversive, not the Marquis De Sade.) While I'd like to think this had depth, it might have amounted to little more than the literary equivalent of throwing a tantrum to get attention. It remains unpublished, and only a few of my friends ever read it. I read it a few years later and found that it was an ugly story, but not because of its depravity. Oscar Wilde once wrote that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, but that books are merely well-written or poorly written. This story of mine was poorly written. For one, it is little more than a philosophical tome masquerading as fiction, instead of being a well-developed narrative that might allow the reader to infer their own conclusions. But the biggest failing, in my mind, is the same one Stephen King offered of Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of Jack Torrance: there's no character progression. Jack Nicholson seems nuts from the very first frame of the film, and so his descent into insanity in the Overlook Hotel is not much of a shock. My protagonist failed to develop the same way: he's unrelatable and crazy from the moment we meet him. Nor do I develop the character well enough that the reader could understand his motivations for doing such a horrible thing. A story might ask a reader to accept one, maybe two, elements of the story on faith, without adequate explanation, but inexplicable motives of the central character can't be one of these.
I once had the idea to take the central premise of American Psycho and develop the same idea, with a similar central character, but set in Silicon Valley instead of Wall Street. Five years later, when I ended up living and working in Silicon Valley, one of my co-workers mentioned at a group lunch that someone could basically tell the same story of American Psycho, but with the central character existing in Silicon Valley. He was being facetious, but I later struck him up in conversation and mentioned that I had had the same idea, and felt that it had legs as a story project. "That's derivative," he said simply, cutting off the conversation. He misunderstood my suggestion. I once heard a story that Dostoevsky was, at some point in his life, about to be executed by a firing squad. While he was on his knees, anticipating the killing shot, he looked up and saw the sun coming through a tree, and it struck him as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Dostoevsky was spared that day, but in what he thought might be his last moment, he felt a deep, sincere appreciation for something as simple as the sun shining through a tree. He tried to imagine what it would be like for a human being who lived their entire life with that perspective, if they lived every day (to borrow a line from Einstein) as though everything were a miracle. Such a person would certainly be regarded as stupid by those around him, because their priorities would be so misaligned when compared with those of everyone else. It was (reputedly) from this idea that he developed the story that would become The Idiot. I did not mean to suggest that one could transplant the exact psychopathic character of Patrick Bateman from a trader on Wall Street to a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and tell the same story. The point is: what if you have a character with an impoverished inner life, so desperate for external validation that his identity is little more than to outwardly conform to circumstances to win approval from those around him, and you put that character in modern-day Silicon Valley? What happens to him? What is his story? I have found it useful, just as an intellectual game, to take the smallest, most reduced possible seed of an idea that backs an existing story, place it into different initial boundary conditions in my head, and see how the story evolves in a different environment or setting.
In early 2015, I had an idea for a story where the central character, a woman in her late twenties, begins to realize (accept?) that her own emotions are the direct causal factor in local weather patterns wherever she is living. When she feels sad, for example, it rains. I knew that I wanted this to be the premise, that she would be married, and I knew exactly how their story should end. But who was she? What was her story? What catalyzes the ending I had in mind? Initially, I spent a good deal of time coming up with nothing but terrible answers to all of these questions. A few months later, I was invited to Europe with a friend of mine, who was returning to his city of origin to visit friends and family in southern France. One night, during our visit to the world-famous Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain, and the night before the eponymous event, I broke from the group I was with and spent the entire night wandering the city on my own. Such a European festival is chaos. The old brick streets and bars situated in buildings with Spanish architecture were barely navigable, being as overloaded as they were by hoards of drunk partiers, trash, vomit, and myriad heaps of broken beer bottles. It was while walking on the fringes of this city around 4 in the morning that I saw a woman tending to the man she must have been dating, who was contorted into a fetal position on the ground in a puddle of his own puke. Immediately I knew who my main character was and what the specifics of (almost) her entire story would be. Like a bolt from the sky, it hit me that hers was a tale about codependency.
A few months ago I attended a party hosted by someone I didn't know, but with whom I shared a mutual acquaintance. She told me about a movie screenplay she was interested in writing, which would be a horror film about a group of people who are camping in the wilderness for the weekend and end up stumbling into a series underground caves. I asked her for details about this story. Who are the main characters? Who are the antagonists? Is there a monster? She did not have many details, and she admitted that she wasn't even much of a fan of the horror genre. This made me all the more curious: then why is she even interested in this story? Without directly answering that particular question, she shortly thereafter told me about a falling out she had had recently with a friend of hers, and the circumstances under which it had happened. Since this involved camping, it dawned on me that the idea for this story had been spawned (most likely) by this particular incident in her life. She was developing the story in her mind to work this out. I tried to avoid specifics, because those specifics don't matter, but I made a few suggestions about how the story could be structured, who the characters might be, and how things might play out in the end. I tried pointing her down the general path that I felt would be most fruitful for her, even if she never ended up writing a single word of this screenplay: you must write your own conflict into the tension between the characters in the story, it must present an accurate and fair representation of both sides, and you must figure out how to resolve this conflict in the conclusion of the film.
While I could go on like this, ideas for stories are plentiful, cheap, and generated with relative ease. Fruition is the pearl of great price that eludes the artist with a nascent inclination to breath life into some concept. A friend of mine from long ago once wrote that writing is a terribly lonely business, like walking down an empty hallway listening to the echoes of your own footsteps. I spend my days hunched over a desk, peering into a computer monitor, writing programmatic code in a text editor. (Or, more likely these days, writing descriptions in Google docs that describe code others should write.) The last thing one wants to do when liberated from such responsibilities is to spend free time doing the same thing at any length. Furthermore, I'm at something of a disadvantage because in grade school, I was naturally a good writer, which sent me into the adult world with the undue conceit that I did not need to practice or develop talent at writing. I've shed this recently, and have accepted that my own writing ability, while it might be somewhat above average, is still sorely lacking an operative understanding of things like sentence structure, aesthetic appeal, character development, compelling dialogue, and so on. This is say nothing of the art of revision, which my own ego has left entirely in my blind spot up until now. (Isn't the need for an editor the mark of a writer who isn't good enough?) I understand now that there are several levels between me and most adept, published writers. True knowledge is knowing you know nothing, an admission which opens the recipient to self-improvement. As the old Greek mysteries say: give up what that thou hast, and then thou wilt receive. The first thing to go should be any illusion of perfection.
I derive little authority from my own experience that entitles me to comment on the art of writing, because I have done precious little of it, and what little I have done is a dim memory from several lifetimes ago. I grew up with a secret longing to be a writer, a dream that did not last long once I ended up in college and was facing the specter of what it means to be an adult in the world. That has essentially left me with a vocabulary that I use in my day-to-day life that makes me come across as pretentious, and the slow accretion in my head of several novels that I tell myself I "might write someday". The reader would do well to bear this in mind, and understand that I write here for the same reason that many teachers end up in their chosen profession: those who teach often learn more than their students, and so I write here, under the guise of offering instruction to others, with the not-so-secret agenda of ultimately instructing myself.
In some measure, the maturity of a person comes with the gradual dissolution of the doctrinaire rule that nothing can be learned from our forebears. The wealth of knowledge from the geniuses of the past is often obscured by the pettiness and shortcomings of those who might teach it to us. For me, this veil was punctured initially by a conversation I had with my mother when I was around 30 years of age. Knowing that she had studied English literature when she was in college, I asked her what she thought about Shakespeare. To my surprise, she responded dismissively, saying that Shakespeare and his works had only survived to the present day because English teachers insist on teaching him, year after year, generation after generation, and that he was a naked emperor with no inherent artistic merit. When someone devotes their academic life to a particular subject, I don't expect them to love everything related to their major, but I generally expect that they're able to find at least one dimension of merit to anything that might pertain to their field of study. In any case, I took it as a potential clue about the origins of my own cynical attitude.
What started to draw back the veil entirely was the ending of the television show "Breaking Bad". This was an ending that I connected with emotionally, quite strongly, and one that satisfied me. It seems that this was an almost universal reaction, both from casual viewers and those who make a living criticizing such things. In the wake of this, I was struck by a desire to figure out why. Why, exactly, had the conclusion of this story, which was a rather dark morality tale about an everyman who becomes a drug lord, been so satisfying to so many people?
My seeking took me to Aristotle's Poetics, and his formula for what makes a good tragedy. They are elements that are known to just about every high school student. Tragedy is characterized by suffering, but it must also be due to the hamartia (fatal flaw) of the protagonist and not merely by unfortunate circumstances. In the case of the character of Walter White, there is the desire for wealth, ostensibly for benevolent reasons. The climax of the story is precipitated by a peripeteia, a reversal of circumstances, where Walt loses his family and much of his fortune due to his own avarice. While in exile, at the end of penultimate episode, he sees colleagues from a past life on Charlie Rose, and his reaction what they say about him on TV is clearly the moment of anagnorisis (recognition), in which he comes to understand his own motives, and that he is not, as previously believed, the hero in his own story. We learn this from his confession to his wife in the series finale, in which he finally admits that he acted out of self-interest, with the rationalization that he was trying to support his family. There is catharsis in this, provided that the narrative has maintained a protagonist sympathetic to the viewer, because the audience can imagine themselves committing the same error. Such is the essence of the tragic hero. (As I write on the brink of the final season of "Better Call Saul", I have spent a fair amount of time musing on how these elements might be used to construct an ending for the character of Saul Goodman. My best guess: the arrival of the settlement money from the Sandpiper Crossing lawsuit will tempt "Gene" to return to Albuquerque and lead to his own tragic end.)
Despite the abundance of five-dollar words in the preceding paragraph, they don't mean much more to me now than when I first forgot them after high school English class. Understanding them intellectually is one thing, but it is another thing entirely to be able to paint a narrative that employs them and manages to successfully elicit the desired emotional effect. In any case, the ending of "Breaking Bad" changed my whole way of looking at the world, and forced perspective about how my way of living might be affecting those around me. Upon learning that ancient Greek philosophy outlined the structure of such a psychologically transformative crime drama presented as a television series finally drilled it into my skull that our ancestors might be able to teach us something useful.
I've realized in the last year or so that my ideas for stories, and the characters that inhabit them, are usually a means of exorcising my own demons. In college, I wrote a novella, which I constructed in my head over the course of one fall semester, and which I pounded out into a computer during finals week in December, a week during which I did little more than drink copious amounts of liquor, write this book, and somehow manage to ace all my final exams. (I slept the week after.) The book itself is about a college student living life as an alienated paraphiliac who, failing to figure out his future or how he fits into the world, decides to go on a hedonistic sexual assault bender one evening, a final bang that will punctuate his life with, if nothing else, a sense of biological fulfillment. Apart from the alienation of the central character, I had little directly in common with the central character, and was instead trying to write a story to help my 20-year-old self, who was developmentally stunted at the mental age of 12, make sense of the chaotic and contradictory adult world into which I had recently been plunged and was struggling to integrate myself. I did this by attempting to write the most disturbing, unsettling thing I possibly could, by exploring all of the ugliest aspects of human nature via the most abhorrent manifestations of our sexuality. (I did not actually include the more graphic scenes in the narrative, instead allowing them to happen "off camera"; I was trying to be subversive, not the Marquis De Sade.) While I'd like to think this had depth, it might have amounted to little more than the literary equivalent of throwing a tantrum to get attention. It remains unpublished, and only a few of my friends ever read it. I read it a few years later and found that it was an ugly story, but not because of its depravity. Oscar Wilde once wrote that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, but that books are merely well-written or poorly written. This story of mine was poorly written. For one, it is little more than a philosophical tome masquerading as fiction, instead of being a well-developed narrative that might allow the reader to infer their own conclusions. But the biggest failing, in my mind, is the same one Stephen King offered of Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of Jack Torrance: there's no character progression. Jack Nicholson seems nuts from the very first frame of the film, and so his descent into insanity in the Overlook Hotel is not much of a shock. My protagonist failed to develop the same way: he's unrelatable and crazy from the moment we meet him. Nor do I develop the character well enough that the reader could understand his motivations for doing such a horrible thing. A story might ask a reader to accept one, maybe two, elements of the story on faith, without adequate explanation, but inexplicable motives of the central character can't be one of these.
I once had the idea to take the central premise of American Psycho and develop the same idea, with a similar central character, but set in Silicon Valley instead of Wall Street. Five years later, when I ended up living and working in Silicon Valley, one of my co-workers mentioned at a group lunch that someone could basically tell the same story of American Psycho, but with the central character existing in Silicon Valley. He was being facetious, but I later struck him up in conversation and mentioned that I had had the same idea, and felt that it had legs as a story project. "That's derivative," he said simply, cutting off the conversation. He misunderstood my suggestion. I once heard a story that Dostoevsky was, at some point in his life, about to be executed by a firing squad. While he was on his knees, anticipating the killing shot, he looked up and saw the sun coming through a tree, and it struck him as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Dostoevsky was spared that day, but in what he thought might be his last moment, he felt a deep, sincere appreciation for something as simple as the sun shining through a tree. He tried to imagine what it would be like for a human being who lived their entire life with that perspective, if they lived every day (to borrow a line from Einstein) as though everything were a miracle. Such a person would certainly be regarded as stupid by those around him, because their priorities would be so misaligned when compared with those of everyone else. It was (reputedly) from this idea that he developed the story that would become The Idiot. I did not mean to suggest that one could transplant the exact psychopathic character of Patrick Bateman from a trader on Wall Street to a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and tell the same story. The point is: what if you have a character with an impoverished inner life, so desperate for external validation that his identity is little more than to outwardly conform to circumstances to win approval from those around him, and you put that character in modern-day Silicon Valley? What happens to him? What is his story? I have found it useful, just as an intellectual game, to take the smallest, most reduced possible seed of an idea that backs an existing story, place it into different initial boundary conditions in my head, and see how the story evolves in a different environment or setting.
In early 2015, I had an idea for a story where the central character, a woman in her late twenties, begins to realize (accept?) that her own emotions are the direct causal factor in local weather patterns wherever she is living. When she feels sad, for example, it rains. I knew that I wanted this to be the premise, that she would be married, and I knew exactly how their story should end. But who was she? What was her story? What catalyzes the ending I had in mind? Initially, I spent a good deal of time coming up with nothing but terrible answers to all of these questions. A few months later, I was invited to Europe with a friend of mine, who was returning to his city of origin to visit friends and family in southern France. One night, during our visit to the world-famous Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain, and the night before the eponymous event, I broke from the group I was with and spent the entire night wandering the city on my own. Such a European festival is chaos. The old brick streets and bars situated in buildings with Spanish architecture were barely navigable, being as overloaded as they were by hoards of drunk partiers, trash, vomit, and myriad heaps of broken beer bottles. It was while walking on the fringes of this city around 4 in the morning that I saw a woman tending to the man she must have been dating, who was contorted into a fetal position on the ground in a puddle of his own puke. Immediately I knew who my main character was and what the specifics of (almost) her entire story would be. Like a bolt from the sky, it hit me that hers was a tale about codependency.
A few months ago I attended a party hosted by someone I didn't know, but with whom I shared a mutual acquaintance. She told me about a movie screenplay she was interested in writing, which would be a horror film about a group of people who are camping in the wilderness for the weekend and end up stumbling into a series underground caves. I asked her for details about this story. Who are the main characters? Who are the antagonists? Is there a monster? She did not have many details, and she admitted that she wasn't even much of a fan of the horror genre. This made me all the more curious: then why is she even interested in this story? Without directly answering that particular question, she shortly thereafter told me about a falling out she had had recently with a friend of hers, and the circumstances under which it had happened. Since this involved camping, it dawned on me that the idea for this story had been spawned (most likely) by this particular incident in her life. She was developing the story in her mind to work this out. I tried to avoid specifics, because those specifics don't matter, but I made a few suggestions about how the story could be structured, who the characters might be, and how things might play out in the end. I tried pointing her down the general path that I felt would be most fruitful for her, even if she never ended up writing a single word of this screenplay: you must write your own conflict into the tension between the characters in the story, it must present an accurate and fair representation of both sides, and you must figure out how to resolve this conflict in the conclusion of the film.
While I could go on like this, ideas for stories are plentiful, cheap, and generated with relative ease. Fruition is the pearl of great price that eludes the artist with a nascent inclination to breath life into some concept. A friend of mine from long ago once wrote that writing is a terribly lonely business, like walking down an empty hallway listening to the echoes of your own footsteps. I spend my days hunched over a desk, peering into a computer monitor, writing programmatic code in a text editor. (Or, more likely these days, writing descriptions in Google docs that describe code others should write.) The last thing one wants to do when liberated from such responsibilities is to spend free time doing the same thing at any length. Furthermore, I'm at something of a disadvantage because in grade school, I was naturally a good writer, which sent me into the adult world with the undue conceit that I did not need to practice or develop talent at writing. I've shed this recently, and have accepted that my own writing ability, while it might be somewhat above average, is still sorely lacking an operative understanding of things like sentence structure, aesthetic appeal, character development, compelling dialogue, and so on. This is say nothing of the art of revision, which my own ego has left entirely in my blind spot up until now. (Isn't the need for an editor the mark of a writer who isn't good enough?) I understand now that there are several levels between me and most adept, published writers. True knowledge is knowing you know nothing, an admission which opens the recipient to self-improvement. As the old Greek mysteries say: give up what that thou hast, and then thou wilt receive. The first thing to go should be any illusion of perfection.