#9 – The Universe Conspires

File under: Attention to detail

Voiced by the fire of:

Johnny Cash – “I Walk the Line”
Johnny Cash – “Ring of Fire”
Johnny Cash – “I Still Miss Someone”

Back to shamanism.

You write from what you know, that’s standard.  It’s when the universe notices your little project and starts to feed you things you don’t know that writing gets interesting.  Very often, it’s wise to just write the story, capture the human drama, and let the technical aspects of your situation stand on their own hobbled legs with the understanding that you’ll do a repair job later, when your muse is away, and it’s time for the grunt work of positing realistic jetpack physics or police procedure, or religious tradition, or whatever your setting demands.

And that’s when you’ll discover the real poetic connections between your plot, your theme, your symbols, and the facts.  Things that you shouldn’t have known were true, things that weren’t just common sense and deduction, things added for color or characterization…they were right, and they bridge your structure to your style.  It was truer than you’d realized.  The tenets of the story were already in place, not in the fiction, but in reality, and the writing itself was just archeological work.

Very many writers notice this rising poetic connection at large as they dig into their creation.  The universe feeds the author necessary bits and pieces to expand the story.  It is, most likely, the upward curve of Littlewood’s Law combined with a brain scanning for information that fits into the working model of the story, making associations that inevitably yield , but that’s ok.  It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to work.  The magic isn’t in ESP or sentient Ideaspace.  The magic is in the heightened awareness of the individual who suddenly realizes that the entire world can be refitted into a cohesive, meaningful narrative as needed.  No matter what idea we want to communicate, there are thousands of associated ideas that will help the reader triangulate your course.

And then…sometimes life hauls off on a story of its own: a chance meeting of old flames on the train, complementary love-lives, brutally honest declarations…a story will form itself anywhere you look, and sometimes, everywhere you turn.

Of course, if your life does launch itself into a story, it’s up to you, as the protagonist, to take action.  Help out your cause.  Use all your writerly skills to anticipate what should happen in order to get to your ultimate objective, and how to do that in keeping with the character arc you want (you probably don’t want to end up in a stand-off with ATF agents, or crying in the rain like the narrator of A Farewell to Arms). 

My roommate hooked me on Raymond Chandler this year. The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely. Beautiful titles, like the last minor chord in a piano solo.  Magic invocations, I think, instantly creating a world of passionate regret and existential hopelessness.  Romanticism in spite of itself.

Chandler said, when in doubt, have a man enter the room with a gun.  What he meant was to introduce change and high-stakes tension that would be resolved at your leisure, on the other side of your hesitance.  It doesn’t matter if it’s with either previously existing threads or material yet to be revealed, as long as you answer the event with an appropriate response.

So I’m doing just that. I’m stitching my week into the design of a screenplay I’ve had handy, a good but shapeless idea called DEATH PERCEPTION.  Yeah, I know. Stupid title.  In premise: a silver-tongued yuppie assumes Death’s duties while the Grim Reaper takes a much-needed vacation, in exchange for eternal life.  His too-efficient success is contested by Satanic intervention.  And thanks to some surprisingly literary drama in my own life, I now know exactly how I’m going to introduce his love interest, and arc their dance of desire to its union. (God send it applies to the reality, too.)

So writing may consult the spirits or concoct a rite for change, or that may be a crazy, unsupported belief (it’s okay to have those if you cop to it. You get whimsy plus perspective).  All we can say for certain is that writing is a game played with one’s own brain.  A logic game, an entertainment routine, a cleverness contest, an emotional outlet.  Since it’s an agreeable thing to seek a logical, clever, entertaining and sensitive existence, there’s no reason you shouldn’t apply your work to your life, and your life to work.  After all, it’s really just an examination of your thoughts and the world around you.  You may devise a neat plot resolution, or you may solve your real-life problems, and if you’re lucky, you’ll pull off both.

Short column this week, sorry.  But I’m looking for a man with a gun.