And Now We're Alone.

J.D. Salinger died today, as you've certainly heard. On NPR they were asking people what they remembered most about Catcher in the Rye, and the answer was mostly about the voice. They asked about his other writing and what was best remembered was thematic: childhood giving way to mental illness and doom.

I read Catcher in the Rye first, like you do, and went on to read everything Salinger wrote, unless of course the mystical pile of unpublished manuscripts exists. More than voice, I remember the feeling of Catcher in the Rye, the unstoppable emptying out of magic that is the end of childhood. The vague, dull amnesiac horror of approaching adulthood. If nothing else, I knew forever that someone understood.

I'll never read Catcher in the Rye again. Because I don't want that feeling to change. I'm still out there on that cliff, too, and I'm not coming inside. Not even when it gets dark.

Secrets.

Got a care package from home today. Life on the north shore of Kauai ain't exactly roughing it, but there are a few things that can't be had, so my dear mother sends along packages. Today's included a few news clippings about Haiti and such, and then I fished out the last torn square of newsprint and turned it over...

There was a poem for a man who died eleven years ago this month. Frank McConnell, gentleman scholar, professor of English at UCSB. He was a rare genius, an expert in Science Fiction and a biblical scholar. He was married to a woman who already had a young son. They were not married very long when he died, and for the last eleven years on the anniversary of his death she runs a picture of him with a poem in the News-Press. Here is this year's poem:

(As sung by Nancy LaMott)

As I remember him, he had a gentle way.

He was so bright of mind, I can't find words to say.

He turned the darkest day into a world of gold.

He made things younger when they were growing old....

As I remember him, he was a loving man.

I knew it well because where he was, life began.

And though I loved the boy for just a little while,

It was so wonderful. It was so beautiful.

As I remember him, I smile.

Me again... As I remember him, he was a drinker and a smoker, he was round and wore seersucker suits in spring and only got his hair cut every six months or so. He got red in the face when he laughed, and he laughed a lot. He'd stand on the stage in front of three hundred students, light a cigarette, and say "screw 'em, I got tenure." He gave away the trick ending to Citizen Kane to the entire class, because if we hadn't seen it by the time we got to college we deserved what we got. On the class before Halloween, which was always wild at UCSB, he gave us a wonderful talk about being careful, and told us that we were the same person sober or drunk, and to not pour excuses out of bottles.

Frank McConnell was also someone none of us knew. He was someone worthy of a poem in the paper every year. Someone who became a loving dad to a young boy and an adored husband to his wife. Everyone loved the part of him they knew, and we all knew different parts. As wonderful as he was in the lecture hall, and in the pub at the student store afterward, he was, I suspect, more wonderful at home.

That's today's lesson. I didn't invent the idea that nobody knows who anyone else is when they are alone, or in the privacy of their own thoughts. I didn't come up with the statement that every marriage is an unknown but to the two people involved. Every family is a mystery to outsiders. But I want you to think about that when you're writing. Some of the most dramatic, most terrifying, most astonishing writing is not about dead bodies and bombs and alien invasions, it's about what happens when a door closes, shutting out the rest of the world, and your characters are private, even alone. Do not neglect to show your readers that which they rarely see.

Frank, this Heineken's for you.

Why Reading Annoys Your Family.

Because it causes mental derangement and emotional instability. Also, there are bad parts.

I hope you don't find yourself on Dr. Phil. Unless you're weird in a funny way that I might enjoy. I like hoarders, as a tip, although they are annoying. I also like compulsive shoppers, because they make me feel better about my Walmart ways. The happy fact is that the majority of us won't qualify to join the Mentals of Melrose. We're mostly fine most of the time.

And then we start reading That Book, and it all goes horribly wrong. Which book? That really good book, the theme of which is Everything That Hurts. Not just what hurts the characters, but what hurts the reader.

It might be the book that peels off your carefully-maintained illusions, exposes the hopelessness of your dreams, the pettiness of your pre-conceived notions, or just gets a thumbnail under the scab that covers your childhood. Trivial concerns, certainly, but you are suddenly completely exposed to plenty of pain you weren't expecting.

I'll give you two examples, but if you think I'm going to explain why these two do me in, you have another think coming: Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, and The Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Wallace Stegner. I'm only a sixth of the way through the latter, and I expect to be a jelly by the time it's done.

Be kind to your families and friends. Be aware if what you are reading is wrecking you. Remember that you are visiting and living in a world they aren't, even if they did once. If your reading is damaging your real life, take a break from that book. Join that real life already in progress. Those folks miss you when you're gone.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain will always be there waiting for you. Somewhere.

Irony and the Identity Issue.

NPR played Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech yesterday and I turned it up loud. And on the news that night came a march of demonstrators at the state house in Honolulu, and I thought it was a demonstration in recognition of Dr. King's life and achievements. No, within moments my head had exploded.

They were demonstrating against a bill before the state legislature that would give gay people the right to civil unions in the state of Hawai'i. Yes, I said against. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

So I stopped shouting at the people on the television and scraped my brains off the walls. And the more I thought of it, the more the irony started to crush me. Hawai'i, which has the highest racial diversity in the nation. Hawai'i, where the President of the United States was born to parents who would not have been allowed to marry in other states.

I doubt these protesters would come out in favor of miscegenation laws today, the non-existence of which allowed them to be a part of families they love and value, but they want to deny the same rights and basic human dignity to homosexuals. You can appreciate the irony.

Here's where this intersects with writing: your characters had better not understand themselves any better than these folks. Not at first, anyway. They can have, probably should have, a brain-splattering enlightenment somewhere along the line. And if you're writing drama, it will probably come after they've done some enormous damage along the way with their idiocy.

I wish they were not, at present, damaging my lovely state and her residents. All of them.

Tomorrow, perhaps we will talk about why your family would like you to read less.

Disgust is Now Infinite.

Remember my earlier discussion of PublishAmerica's new scam, claiming to send copies of their writers' books to Oprah, Walmart, etc. if only they'll pay for a pile of overpriced paperbacks? Here is the official Lowest of the Low. What a bunch of absolute bastards:

Your Book In Borders Helps Haiti
Dear Author:

PublishAmerica will put your book in your local Borders!

We will donate your book to Borders. As many copies as you determine. We will also make a donation on your behalf to the earthquake victims in Haiti!

We're not waiting for the nation's second largest bookstore, Borders, to order your book. We're donating it to them, as many copies as you choose. They may put up your book for sale any way they want, and we will inform your local newspaper about Borders and your book.

Here's how we do it:

You may order any number of books you want on hand, and PublishAmerica
will match the order. We will donate the exact same number of books to
your local Borders store. In fact, we won't even charge Borders for the shipping!
And you receive a 40 pct discount!

On top of that, PublishAmerica donates $1 for each
Borders book to the American Red Cross Haiti relief effort.

Example: you order 15 copies, we print 30. We ship your 15 copies to you, and the same week we ship an additional 15 books to your local Borders store, at NO cost to the bookstore. Plus $15 goes to Haiti!

Go to www.publishamerica.net, find your book, click on it, then add to cart, indicate quantity, and use this coupon: Borders40. Then click Recalculate and finish the transaction. Minimum volume is 12 copies.

Want fewer books? Then use this coupon: Borders30. No minimum volume requirement here. This will give you a discount of 30 pct, and we'll still donate as many books to Borders as you order for yourself, plus we'll still make the donation to Haiti.

In the Ordering Instructions field, be sure to indicate the address of your local
Borders store. By using the coupon you are authorizing us to match your
order and donate the books. You may also request that we ship the FREE
books to your local Waldenbooks store instead, or to yourself.
Also write "Media Yes" in the Instructions field, and we'll contact you for name
and address of your local newspaper.


U.S. stores only. Full-color and hardcovers excluded. Offer expires this weekend on Sunday night.

Thank you,
PublishAmerica Author Support Team

My Neurosis, Let Me Show You It.

This is what happens to me when I write without an outline:

When the novel was at 45K words, I was in terror that it would be finished at 60K words.

Now it is as 65K words, and I am in terror that it will go over 100K words.

If you are also a crazed structuralist, I recommend an outline.

Little Problems, Big Problems.

Remember John Crowley's Little, Big, that I mentioned a couple of days ago? Beautiful style, singular voice? I stopped reading it last night. Because a few things weren't going well. I'll start with the Last Straw:

1. People Don't Act That Way. I won't spoil the story, but suffice it to say that one character does something Very Very Bad. This something should make the spouse of that character see that he or she is Horribly Killed to Death. At least, that's what I'd do, and I'd use plenty of pointy objects to do it, too. The wronged spouse, however, merely shrugs his/her shoulders and on the story goes, I suppose. I, sadly, could go no further.

Indeed, the entire book was chock-a-block with oddities that were never questioned. Even our would-be POV character, who enters a very unusual community, accepts it right away and carries on as though he has always lived there. Much here is odd, but nothing is made of it. And there is so much of it, in that very elaborate writing style, that it is hard to keep your feet.

Why is everyone behaving so singularly? Because, dear reader, there is:

2. A Tale. Not the one in the book, but the one we're told controls every event and character in the book. Yes, everything that happens to these folks for generation after generation is part of The Tale. See why Wronged Spouse just brushes off an event that would drive me to grisly homicide? Because it is part of The Tale. No point fussing. What will be will be. And they all buy in to this. They've all drunk the grape Kool-Aid.

Here's a bit of Film School Wisdom: Destiny is what you chase. Fate is what chases you. If you do nothing, you will never achieve your destiny, but will be run over by fate. That last bit is pretty much the one thing that doesn't work in fiction: sitting there awaiting your fate. Well, maybe it can work in a short story. In a novel it becomes tiresome, fast.

And so I bailed. I had bought the book hoping for something like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The writing style in Little, Big was more florid, certainly, but there were three more important differences:

1. Clarke's world is very much like our own. The magic functions within a very familiar history (look, footnotes!). Crowley's world is slightly different in many, many ways that aren't always clear.

2. Clarke's characters behave as we would expect them to behave. The English gentlemen are English gentlemen. This makes the not-entirely-normal characters stand out nicely. And even those characters were described in the same style as the others. I think of it as a "just so" technique. No pointing and saying "look at this!" Those elements of the story that stand out as unusual do so by their nature, not because of the writer making a big deal about them.

3. Jonathan Strange has a major goal in the novel that gets him into big trouble. Actually, it gets his wife into worse trouble, but you take my meaning. He had a destiny, and he pursued it. In Crowley's world, just at the moment when I thought one character was in big trouble, well, nope. It was all part of The Tale, so the other characters let it pass.

I let this tale pass.