Genius, Explain Thyself

Writing about music, Martin Mull is supposed to have said, is like dancing about architecture – Implying that the application of one discipline to the other doesn’t necessarily make sense.

That’s what came to mind when I read Matteo Pericoli’s piece “Writers as Architects” in the New York Times’ Opinionator column, in which he describes his MFA students working with architecture students to create visual representations of the underpinnings of a short story or novel.
While there’s an awful lot of gobbldedygook in his essay, and in the descriptions his students offer of their architectural renderings of, say, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” – is there really “magic,” as he says, in bringing “two students from very different disciplines coming together, now sharing a common language, knowing exactly where to meet, and why”? – I applaud the basic tenets of the exercise: Studying a novel or short story to examine its basic structure in order to understand if the structure itself lends to the story, its longetivity, its readability, and how readers relate to it.

I’m not much of a planner when I write – I just like to see where things go. Sometimes, they go nowhere, which reveals the shortcoming of my writing style. On the other hand, I have tried to be much more meticulous in planning things out and researching them, and find, for the most part, I’m not able to write the story. Maybe I’m the kind of writer who has to get stuff out on paper before I can discern the structure a story is going to take. That’s why we have drafts – and that’s why architects design their buildings time and again, consulting with engineers and such, on paper before any dirt is ever moved. I could learn from this concept.

I have done some visualizations – line drawings, character trees, etc., as I write, in order to help me see things. I have done some very rough storyboarding as a way to help me see more visually. So I get the concept that getting something on paper besides words is a great way to help a writer be better at the art of writing. But the craft still has to be there.

I’d be interested in being a fly on the wall in one of Pericoli’s classrooms, seeing how and if his students take the concepts they’ve learned and apply them to their own writing. Looking at how other writers write is well and good, but until you can look objectively at how you write, and how you could improve your writing through such analysis, such classes and such projects are really only meant to employ MFA instructors and keep the local arts and crafts supply warehouses with steady customers looking for knives, glue, and cardboard.

That’s the thing, though – is this a useful exercise that gets novels written? One rather snarky commentator on the article says this:

Sometimes when I read the NY Times I feel very inadequate. This is one of those times. I just don’t equate writing with architecture.

I just completed my first novel and am trying my best to get it published. Perhaps I should add a drawing in my query letter to agents. Maybe I’ll get lucky! The novel is titles Passports Out of Crazy Town, so I could construct a few buildings that are slightly askew and a bridge leading to another group of buildings that are perfectly balanced. So much for wracking my brains to write a decent synopsis, just a rendering of this may work wonders. I’ll keep my fingers crossed!

Obviously, a writer who spends too much time with the pre-visualization but who never actually goes on to the writing is probably better off working as a model builder, not as a writer.

Here’s an example of what I mean (once you get past the clichés – doesn’t everyone “push the limits” of their craft? Well, they should. But they shouldn’t say it that way).

I think this is what Pericoli is shooting for in this class and exercise, but ironically he’s too interested in explaining the process to help us connect the dots as to why this is a valuable exercise for writers: Visuatlization leading to better, more vivid writing. I hope he helps his students connect the dots between the exercise and their own writing.

Ah, Bach . . .

I think I've shared this video before:

I've listened to Bach's music -- and this piece in particular -- since I was old enough to tune in NPR on the little transistor radio I got for Christmas all these years ago. This piece particularly captivates me in how Bach uses the same motifs, stretches of tune and other bits and bobs over and over again, changing them in pitch, speed, et cetera -- you can tell I'm not really musically inclined -- to make a wonderful bit of music out of some pretty basic parts.

Tonight, as I watched this video and listened to the music again, it dawned on me how similar writing music is to writing in general.

All regular readers here know I'm writing novels. And as all novelists, I have a few set pieces I may use over and over again, some to great effect, some to lesser effect, but they're always there, in the foreground, in the background, changed a little but always recognizable.

There are some writers -- like me -- who handle such repetition clumsily. But there are others, ah, the others, the Steinbecks, and Proulxes, the Clarkes and such, who re-use to great effect as they take familiar material and stretch and pound it a bit until it's something new.

I strive to become such a writer. We shall see.

An Epitaph Graven by A Fool

They have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This is a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him,
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

Thus laments Cassius Hueffer, one of the denizens of the cemeteries of Spoon River, in Edgar Lee Masters’ masterful Spoon River Anthology.

I have teased fellow poets that poetry is dead, yet I read it and occasionally write it. Masters’ poetry in its collective form is the best poetry can be: A stained-glass window’s worth of thought, each filtering the sunlight or moonlight or darkness differently. And oh, what fun it is to read.

Masters wrote it, of course, as part of that uniquely American genre of literature called Rebellion Against the Village. The open-minded, the progressive, the liberal, felt stifled by American small-town life and, as the 19th century turned, they left it in droves for the bustling, sophisticated anonymity of the city. Like some of Masters’ characters, some who left the village discovered they could never leave it, with their small-town minds forever bound by the Spoon River, the mill, the petty squabbles, the powerful overbearing on the meek, the meek seeking impotent justice.

I’ve read a lot of this kind of literature. My favorite is Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street because it, of any book of the genre, shows the small-mindedness of the small town. But the most successful in this genre is Babbitt, another Lewis accomplishment. Because in this story – as we see in Masters’ Spoon River – it’s not the size of the village one flees that matters.

George Babbitt lives in the comfortable largeness of Zenith, an anonymous large American city, synonymous with the Meccas those of the Spoon River ilk were attracted to as they fled their small towns. But poor George, though living in paradise, is just as bound by the type of small-town thinking that Carol Kennicott sees in Gopher Prarie, Minnesota. Though George lives in the big city, he has, as in Spoon River, a small circle of friends and acquaintances and caricatures that, no matter how he tries, he cannot escape. The narrow-mindedness of each country village is transplanted into the city and multiplied a thousand times over. The only surcease a city-dweller has is to sneak off into a neighborhood where he or she is unknown. But as the denizens of Spoon River discover, George still has to go home and can never excape the scrutiny of small minds, bith progressive and convervative, because in some way he is not conforming with their wills, even if their will is nonconformity itself. The tyranny of the small town is not escaped, even in the largest of urban conglomerations. Only the distractions are multiplied.

Samuel, laments Dow Kritt of Spoon River, is forever talking of his elm –
But I did not need to die to learn about roots:
I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River.
Look at my elm!
Sprung from as good a seed as his,
Sown at the same time,
It is dying at the top:
Not from lack of life, nor fungus,
Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks.
Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock,
And can no further spread.
And all the while the top of the tree
Is tiring itself out, and dying,
Trying to grow.