RESTING ACTORS AND THE HYDRAULIC THEORY OF COMPOSITION

by Janice Law

The British have a charming term for out of work actors: they are said to be “resting.” What a nice thought, and one that is apt for writers as well.

Certainly there are writers who never turn from the oar—what the nineteenth century called “the great galley slaves of literature” like Balzac, Sand, Hugo, and Dickens. They seemed never troubled by writer’s block or existential angst, nor gave excuses to push away from the desk. The modern day has seen some prodigies, too. The genre writers, Asimov, Simenon, Steele, King, and Cartland come immediately to mind, but so does Joyce Carol Oates, whose production is legendary, not to mention various best sellers who have recreated the medieval workshop and so enhanced their productivity.

On the other hand, both then and now, there are the one shot wonders. Sometimes they are known for only one book, although they have written others. Some are like Ralph Ellison, who, despite a long and distinguished career, managed to say everything in one terrific novel and never completed another, although a second has been mined from his papers. Then there are other, even less fortunate souls, who suffer longer or shorter periods of crippling writer’s block.

I can’t speak to that, having escaped the affliction, but I do not always produce a steady stream of work. The reason, in my case and I suspect in others, comes down to what I think of as the hydraulic theory of composition. While writer’s block suggests some physical (or psychological) impediment, the hydraulic theory, besides its pleasantly scientific nomenclature, reflects a more positive attitude.

The mind, though active, is rarely an ever flowing fountain. Ideas need to be replenished, and the mind needs to rest while new ideas and sensations and all the neuron activity that we call inspiration gets refreshed.

I think this is why one often feels an idea before it takes clear shape. It’s as if there is a story out there (or more properly “in there”) but it’s not ready yet. It’s resting, in a word, building up the psychic pressure, gathering its forces and bringing them together. Note I say “it,” rather than “me,” for I am sure I’m not the only writer to find the process of generating ideas almost completely mysterious.

Certainly, it is sometimes possible to point to a particular incident, image, or piece of information that gladdened the heart and summoned the Muse. A visit many years ago to the ruined Roman amphitheater at Trier, Germany, with its piles of rubble above and well preserved, if flooded, substructure, immediately suggested a site for homicide.

But the actual novel only started when I had a first sentence: “On Friday, Harry invited the crazy man for dinner.” Why was that essential? I haven’t a clue, but for many years if I had a crime and a first sentence I was good to go. They were the signal that the fountain was ready to turn on.

The hydraulic theory also explains why if one has many distractions—or two arts—the pressure of inspiration drops. When I am painting a great deal, I do less writing. When I have a story in hand, or even more if I am writing a novel, I get fewer ideas for paintings.

I don’t mean that I have less time or energy; that’s as may be, but I have absolutely fewer ideas, fewer times when I look at something and it coalesces into a picture and says “paint me.” And if the Muse is kindly sending images my way, I find that the writing slows down. Maybe I scribble ideas in my notebook, but I don’t get characters whispering in my ear. I perhaps go back through my earlier notes, but nothing wants to develop: I’m depleting whatever makes for narratives elsewhere, using them up with paint on board.

The mysteriousness of the whole process leads to anxiety. Suppose the fountain stops altogether. Suppose next time there is no picture, no story, no idea. Suppose the Muse in a huff has departed for another collection of little gray cells. What then?

Though there are all manner of folks eager to enhance one’s creativity with everything from weird pills to odd rituals, I suspect that one can do no better than continue to court the Muse. One works, one hopes. One sketches, in paint or in prose. One learns patience. Perhaps the Muse is only resting. Perhaps one day soon, she will smile and turn on her mysterious fountain. Perhaps.

AN UNFORTUNATE CHOICE OF WORDS

by John M. Floyd

At our church a few weeks ago—and I’m not kidding, here—I was reading the printed bulletin during the first hymn, and I noticed this, written on page two:

“It’s a glorious day—Stand up and sin!”

I consider myself fairly open-minded, but a church bulletin seemed to be a strange place to offer that kind of encouragement, in whatever position. I caught my wife’s eye and pointed to the puzzling statement, but when she saw it she just gave me one of those weary, frosty, will-you-never-grow-up? looks. So I decided it must have been a typo. What a relief.

Those kinds of errors turn up quite a lot in shop windows, advertisements, and newsletters—and sometimes even books and magazines. Misspellings, extra or deleted letters or words, and misplaced modifiers are always a bad thing, and sometimes they’re bad and hilarious at the same time. One of the worst mistakes a writer can make is to be funny when he’s not trying to be funny.

I choose to believe—or at least hope—that most writing errors are accidental and unintentional. It’s easy to hit the wrong key when you’re typing, especially for me, who still uses the Eagle Method (hover and dive). One mistimed tap of the space bar can turn does not into doe snot, an expression that your computer’s spellchecker will happily approve. Or you might to forget to hit a key at all, which can result in telling people to sin rather than sing. But I also realize that some of these errors in wording are made because, sadly, the writer just doesn’t know any better. I’m always reminded of the lady at a block party years ago who informed me, dead serious, that she had a photogenic memory.

Anyhow, I’ve gathered a few of these grammar/spelling misfires that I happen to remember from the past twenty years or so. Some of them appeared in the “Jest for Fun” section of a delightful little magazine called Short Stuff for Grownups, which published a few of my stories years ago, but I can’t recall where I heard or saw the others. I do hope, if any of them are real, that whoever wrote them was then able to find employment elsewhere.

Here they are:

Strengthen your abominable muscles today!

Smile at someone who’s hard to love. Say “Hell” to someone who doesn’t know much about you.

Get your restaurant supplies here: trashcans, food containers, moping equipment.

For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

Remember in prayer those who are sick of our community.

The government will try to control flooding by putting dames in the river.

Weight Watchers will meet at 7 p.m. at the Community Center. Please use large double doors on the south side of the building.

The seats of senators should be vaccinated every six years.

Potluck supper Sunday at 5 p.m.—Prayer and medication to follow.

Ms. Larson recently received a plague for Salesperson of the Year.

Attend the next meeting and you will hear an excellent speaker and heave a healthy lunch.

Automatic washing machines. Please remove all your clothes when the light goes out.

The sermon topic tonight will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice.

We make combs for people with unbreakable teeth.

The pastor is asking ladies of the congregation to lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

Woman in divorce suit decides to go for the juggler.

Toilet out of order—Please use floor below.

The Chamber of Commerce will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment, and gracious hostility.

Now hiring: fat and accurate typists.

A bean supper will be held Thursday night in the school cafeteria. Music will follow.

LOST: a pony belonging to a lady with a silver mane and tail.

Proceeds of the food drive will be used to cripple children.

A flower’s pistol protects it against insects.

Many of our city’s residents suffer from sick as hell anemia.

After a three-day pursuit, the suspect turned himself into a policeman.

The sermon this morning: “Jesus Walks on the Water.” The sermon tonight: “Searching for Jesus.”

The performers received a standing ovulation.

Gone rabbi hunting. Back tomorrow.

The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Monday afternoon.

Sofa bed for sale—with mattress and cousins.

This establishment is not responsible for personal staff left unattended.

Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

Charles Cooper was instrumental in ruining the entire sales operation.

Man arrested for possession of heroine.

The security guard constipated my camera.

Ladies’ Bible Study will be held Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. Everyone is invited to lunch in the fellowship hall when the B. S. is finished.

Try our donuts—None like them.

So how do we, as writers, avoid this kind of thing? Proofread, I guess. And then when you know it’s right, proofread again. These errors are great fun for readers, but they give journalists, sign-painters, and church secretaries a bad name.

By the way, area authors are invited to attend the “Why Don’t Writers Get More Respect?” seminar at the Brandon Library this Friday at noon. Please use rear entrance.

TYPING WITH NINE DIGITS

by Steven Steinbock

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. I broke my hand.

It happened a week ago, a result of a slippery shower floor, a clumsy reach for a fallen bar of soap, and a hard marble ledge. I cursed myself, and after I’d dried off and dressed, I took some Motrin and put the hand on ice. It couldn’t be broken, I told myself. I could still move all my fingers—albeit not fully, and not without considerable pain.

For the next several days, I nursed it, took regular doses of Motrin, and used my weak (right) hand as much as possible. Over the weekend, a change in weather brought the first mosquito of the season. The little bloodsucking pest was hovering over the table where I was working. I reached my hands out and timed the kill. I brought my hands together with a striking force, and . . .

Big mistake.

The family came rushing to see what had happened. My face by this time was nearly as purple as my hand. Spouse looked at me, looked at the hand, and said, “I think you broke it.”

After the X-rays Monday morning, my doctor told me it was a boxer’s fracture. I like that. It gives me an excuse to say, “You should see the other guy.”

But it still hurts. And typing is especially difficult. I can’t hit the (left) shift key or the A key without consciously shifting my hand to the left, or suffering paroxysms of pain if I forget. The safest—but still awkward and inaccurate—method of typing is to use only the forefinger and middle finger of my left hand (and continue touch-typing using all five digits on the right half of the keyboard)

I’m finfing that thw most common mistatw is hitting thw wrong kwys.

By the time you read this, my hand will most likely be in a cast. (Thursday was the soonest I could get in to see the Hand specialist). I don’t know how that will affect my typing.

This provides an interesting segue back to last week’s topic of scannos. First, my editing has yielded a couple interesting errors resulting from incorrect character recognition:

danger came out as clanger
hoping yielded the pessimistic noping

The second scannos-related item is the effect of software choice on the editing process. When I reported to you last week, I’d been using a free Optical Character Recognition program called SimpleOCR. Occasional errors notwithstanding, the program truly is an engineering marvel, and at that price, it’s well worth checking out if for no other reason than to see clever software in action. But I decided to try a demo version of one of the better OCR programs (ABBYY Finereader). The program works great and provides output with far fewer errors than SimpleOCR. The problem is that the errors it misses are more difficult to find.

With SimpleOCR, I had to take a much more active role in the character-recognition and editing process. Each story I scanned required me to go through it twice: once to approve (or alter) the ambiguous suggestions, and a second time to go through the formatting, comparing it to the physical original. ABBYY Finereader did most of that for me. It made the process a dozen times faster (I could finish in five minutes what had taken more than an hour before), but it left me with far less confidence in the accuracy of what I’d done.

WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT?

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

Like the rest of us, I am bombarded by information every day – some of it interesting enough to keep locked away in my mind’s filing system or at least scribbled in a notebook for future use. Some of it may help me on “Jeopardy” or a game of “Trivial Pursuit”, but most often, it ekes its way onto my computer screen for a new story. Today, I thought I might share just a few tidbits I’ve gathered along the roadway of life.

• The creator of the “Nancy Drew Mysteries” was Edward Stratemeyer, but his name never graced the cover. Carolyn Keene was the pseudonym of various writers throughout the years.

While I knew many authors had thrown their hats into the ring writing as Carolyn Keene, I don’t believe I’d seen Edward Stratemeyer’s name associated with creating the teenage girl detective that drove so many of us toward a future as avid mystery lovers.

• Proving that creativity doesn’t end with one talent, the mysteries Armadillos and Old Lace and A Case of Lone Star were written by a country singer named Kinky Friedman.

If I needed any reminder that people aren’t always what shows on the outside or on a performance stage, Country & Western singers prove a second look is often necessary to see the real person beneath the cloak of stardom, I think of the accomplishments of Dolly Parton, businessman woman extraordinaire, and John Rich, the impressive 2011 Celebrity Apprentice. Kinky Friedman, the singer from Texas who ran for Governor in 2006 with the catchphrase, “Why the hell not?”, proves he has ability as a mystery writer. He’s tried his hand at nonfiction, too, including the popular You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think: Ten Commandments For Texas Politics.

• With billions of copies in print, Agatha Christie’s novels rank among the best-selling books of all time, along with the Bible and works of William Shakespeare.

My first thought was WOW! Billions? WOW!

• Agatha Christie seems to like the use of poisons in her stories, perhaps because she worked with pharmaceuticals during World War I.

I didn’t know this about Christie, but it makes sense that with her methodical writing, a background with delicate and precise chemicals would come in handy. My personal opinion is smart people make the best mystery writers and the best readers.

Nothing stimulates our brain quite like solving puzzles and learning new things – even if they are bits of facts we hadn’t known before. Keep reading. I believe it keeps us sharper, interesting, and adds a twinkle to our eyes. Who doesn’t want that?

CIVIL CASE

by Rob Lopresti

Dr Calvin C. Chaffee, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The American Civil War began in April 1861, which means that for 150 years and 1 month people have been debating what caused it. I am happy to report that that argument has been settled at last. By me.

I discovered the solution in an obscure government document (House Report 90 in Serial Set volume 1105, in case you wondered) and together with noted scholar August A. Imholtz, I wrote it up for the journal Library and Information History. Since I suspected that in these tough economic times a few of you may have let your subscriptions to LIH lapse, I wrote up a shorter footnote-free piece on the same subject, which is now available on the website of American Libraries magazine, under the title “How Overdue Books Caused The Civil War.” (Oops… that’s a bit of a giveaway.)

I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here. Suffice it to say that it is a simple tale involving library books, the House of Representatives, the New York Times, and, of course, the Dred Scott Decision.

But this is Criminal Brief, so: is there a crime element? Oh yes. Plenty of that.

Rogue’s gallery

American Libraries asked for photographs for the article, but chose not to use them, so I am putting them up here for your benefit. The gentleman at the top of the page is my favorite player in the story, Dr. Calvin C. Chaffee. CCC was the congressman from Springfield, Massachusetts until his wife got caught up in a national scandal. That isn’t the scandal in our story, but it put him into position, you might say.

Roger Atkinson Pryor, from the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

This next fellow is Roger Atkinson Pryor, congressman from Virginia. You might call him the prosecuting attorney in our little drama.

The third major character is Henry H. Pangborn, reporter for the New York Times. He is the man who told a congressional hearing:“I wrote the body of (the article)… I was probably the original author of it. I am not exactly certain how I did write it. The original copy is probably lost.”

Unfortunately we couldn’t come up with a snapshot of that silver-tongued devil. So here is another photo American Libraries asked for and didn’t use. My wife went to the trouble to take it so what the heck.

Portrait of Rob

Buddy Hackett: Ask me what’s the secret of comedy.
Johnny Carson: What’s the secret of—
Buddy Hackett: Timing.

So, imagine that you have spent two years researching and co-authoring a scholarly article. Then you spend a few months writing a popular version of the same facts, emphasizing all the funny parts that don’t go over so well in an academic paper. And where are you on the day the piece appears on the web?

In another freaking country, that’s where. Dealing with comments and queries on your third-best computer with dubious e-mail connections and no working cell phone. But I’m back now.

Some of you cynics out there may be wondering how much of this is made up. Well, the idea that my article will end debate on the Civil War is wishful thinking, but everything else here and on the American Libraries article is true. Except for the error one of the commenters caught. Nobody’s perfect.

Enjoy.

BOOKS THAT STAYED WITH ME

by Melodie Johnson Howe

I was thinking about the books I chose for John’s column and why I chose them.
These books are like people from my past who have touched me, helped me, made me cry, made me see things differently. They opened up worlds that in my youth I could not imagine. Looking at the list I realize that most of these books were read though the eyes of a girl who wanted to say something, to be heard. In other words, a girl who wanted to be writer.

Look Homeward, Angel was the first book I read that truly swept me away. The young me loved the excess, the overwrought emotion, a heart laid bare. A stone. A leaf. A door. How beautiful those simple words were to me and what weight they carried. I will never forget the character Ben with his broken feet. And when I drive past a cemetery and glimpse the carved stone angels, that youthful feeling of discovery and anguish still floods over me.

When I finished reading Madame Bovary I could never look at women the same way again. And to this day when I walk into a department store I see contemporary versions of Emma grabbing the latest high-heeled shoe, lipstick, or necklace. When these Emmas stare at their reflections there is always disappointment lingering behind the expectation.

I never hoped to write as brilliantly as Flaubert, but I learned from reading Madame Bovary that a captivating story and complicated characters can convey the writer’s theme to the reader without once having to resort to the obvious or the polemic. And to this day I still wish Emma hadn’t killed herself, but I understand why she did. I guess I also learned the meaning of ambivalence from this book.

I was a freshman in college when I read The Great Gatsby. When I finished the book I read everything of Fitzgerald’s I could put my hands on, including all his short stories. The Pat Hobby Stories are still among my favorites.

Reading Gatsby, I learned how a first person voice can be used. How it doesn’t have to get in the way of the other characters voices, how it can stand back, observe, and then move in again becoming part of the story. Gatsby was the quintessential romantic figure, not unlike Emma Bovary. (Romantic figures are very needy.) I fell for him like a ton of bricks. I could see in him what Daisy couldn’t. I could feel his constant yearning. When he was murdered so unjustly and mistakenly, I died too. I fell in love with my first fictional character and learned about the art of the first person narrator at the same time.

I read Leaving Cheyenne only once and I don’t have a copy of it. I think the book is out of print now. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering details of the story. So why is it on my list? The book hit me in the gut. Two men in love with the same woman. One woman in love with the two men. What I remember is the passion and compassion that is shared among these three people and their inevitable loss. I still feel for these characters.

The Long Goodbye is like the Bible to me. I have read it many times. And it always feels new from the opening, where Marlowe sees Terry Lennox drunk and takes pity on him, to the end, when Marlowe sits at his desk as Lennox leaves his office:

I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn around and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.

I never saw any of them again—except the cops.

No way has yet been invented to say good-bye to them.

This book is about two men and loss. Most crime novels are riddled with betrayal but this has a depth that goes beyond the usual. Chandler’s prose is dazzling and he captured my hometown like I had never seen it.

No Country for Old Men is the most recently written book on my list. The reason I picked it is because I hadn’t been struck or gobsmacked by a book in a long time until I read this one. Sherriff Bell is one of the great characters and has a villain to match him. The themes of love, duty, good and evil are brilliantly interwoven into a very bloody brutal story. If a book can have a soul this book has it.

All these books have the similar theme of struggle and loss. And they all have great narratives and characters. Except for one, I read them when I was young. I wonder how good a writer I would be without having read them.