Writing on Writing
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Culture slithers forth, tastes the air, tests it, before ascending the throne. Haughty, sinister, the word sounds like vulture, stinks of well-powdered carrion in my nostrils. In the name of the concept, I smile, I bow; meanwhile, the gorge collects itself, preparing to mount an assault.
The seeds of my life are stories. This journey has bloody, vital roots but ends in banality.
My grandparents gathered secretly along a cod-stinking wharf, in a basement Fado bar in Porto with other plotting Marxists. My great uncle assassinated the damn Marquis-du-Somebody under the dubious cover of a sparkling, Venetian sun at high noon.
Now, my mother administrates an organ transplant unit in Milwaukee–though she is not, nor has been, a doctor of any stripe.
She is Jewish, by birth if not belief; therefore, so am I. When I write, chutzpah peeks out a slimy head from hibernation, eyes the sun’s angle, and blinks. Still, my religion, because of its history of heady, potent culture, fills me with impudence. I find my own roots distasteful. Or, more precisely, my religion disheartens me–because none of it exists, now, except for a well-starched, twice-stewed, odorless, colorless, meal.
Still, the history remains and my blood runs thick with stories, superseding any assimilation to a political or social culture. And in writing, as in life, perspective supersedes everything. Perspective is quality and morality. Perspective is the last wavering note of the shofar on Yom Kippur when you finally realize that all judgments are irrevocable, and absolute.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––
I received a gift. On my seventeenth birthday, I received a book from Janna Sugar. She’s dead, now. When I remember her, I think of her small, soft hands, a wicked smile, and her steady, black eyes. The night of my birthday, we huddled under a playground castle while rain collected in muddy pools under our jeans. She pulled a book from her backpack, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and told me she wanted me to write the inscription.
“This is what you should be reading,” she said. “All the rest–Josh, it doesn’t mean anything.” I was reading Isaac Asimov in those days. She would have loved me, I think, if she had never seen my bookshelves.
“You want me to write an inscription? Isn’t that your job?” I joked.
“Just read,” she said.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Perspective is everything. Each masterpiece, every work of art depends upon these entities: (1) the Artist, (2) the Art, (3) the Observer, and (4) the Lie. Each plays an integral role in any creation:
1. The Writer proposes a hypothesis; every word is a case in the experiment.
2. The Story takes shape or does not; it demands rules and laws that the Writer must follow or fail.
3. The Reader suspends disbelief, enters with an open heart. If the rules of the Story are too
harsh, the Reader will not survive. If the Writer forces the action, cheats the laws of the Story, the Reader will refuse to believe.
4. The Lie is perspective. Each of the entities listed above speaks with a distinct voice, and
knows truth from a single perspective. But the Lie is a single perspective, a unified, unique
voice that represents truth more fundamentally than fact.
A narrative story, whether film or fiction, pursues an outcome through cause and effect, and the outcome must inevitably explain the root cause, the beginning. The root is the Writer. The cause and effect is the Story. The Reader’s experiences in life determine the response, the validity of the creation. The outcome is the unified perspective, the Lie.
When we read, we receive our information directly from the narrator. In movies, the camera dictates the flow of information. Should a movie have a narrator, as does Jesus’ Son, then the viewer must determine who holds the camera. In this example, Billy Crudup plays the narrator/protagonist known as Fuckhead, but if we want a literal description of the action, we cannot trust his senses. A transcendent, intoxicated filter exists between his life and his world, and because the camera remains true to his perspective, we must join with him in sorting out the “truth”. In the back of our brains, we know this is fiction; Denis Johnson wrote the story, he spun it from the void of his own experiences. However, the Lie unifies us with the other essential entities. We have a story.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Throughout the connected stories in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien attempts to rebuild his history. The narrator’s voice speaks from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran suffering from a traumatic stream of memories. By telling stories, he creates a difficult trail through his experiences, subjectively determining truth for himself. In fact, he forces himself not to determine truth by itemizing facts; instead, he tells the stories, then tells them again in a different way, with different characters, different root causes, to uncover a truth that never depends on a literal truth.
Janna died in London. A drunk driver killed her early one morning in April. I was living in Colorado at the time, just a freshman in college preparing for a weekend with friends in Breckenridge. I heard nothing until the following Monday.
But in my mind, I stand with her on the corner of some metal-gray intersection underneath a thick, blowing fog. She flashes a smile, blinks her eyes. And the story ends there–or, rather, it begins, pivoting on agile toes, redirecting the action toward the past, saving her from her future.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
I love writing. I love the paradoxical truth fiction creates. What I love most is the amazement that blooms from the places in a narrative that the author chooses to omit. The reader supplies the imagination, joining with the author in creating a vibrant, unexpected story. And when you realize that movies are a different narrative art, telling a story by engaging the observer in a new way, you understand how human communication has evolved, how simple human beings have found ways to explore their capacity for sharing. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind struck a fundamental chord with my concept of perspective. Our identities are so fragile, and our memories, too, tremble with every new experience. Memento provided me with a fluid example of how a camera can do something so differently than a pencil would. The unifying of perspective is seamless: the writer, the fictional script, the persuasive, tainted voice of narration. Film builds liquid dreams for everyone to see.
My culture abandoned me to a liberal, secular life. But the void exists, demands a perspective. People I meet during my life absorb the characteristics of the stories I know, somehow transforming familiar faces into a single, simple face: likewise abandoned, orphaned from their history, and forced to discover meaning on their own.
I believe fiction creates an audience for our hidden voices, allows us to work out, for ourselves, the misgivings we feel toward the apparent reality of our pasts.
While I have breath, Janna continues to live–I refuse to write the inscription!–and I want to know why. Yes, it's strange that simply speaking cannot solve a mystery like this one while fiction, the creation of new perspective, explains so much more. You see this fundamental truth in the survival of ancient mythologies in stories, in the way the peoples of the world throw their purest souls into the fire for the sake of stories in their bibles. This is what it is: the truth that exists in bibles and mythologies--in stories--is a truth that exists beyond factual truth.
We share stories. We try to understand them. Human beings find the lasting meaning of their lives in no other way.
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home
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The seeds of my life are stories. This journey has bloody, vital roots but ends in banality.
My grandparents gathered secretly along a cod-stinking wharf, in a basement Fado bar in Porto with other plotting Marxists. My great uncle assassinated the damn Marquis-du-Somebody under the dubious cover of a sparkling, Venetian sun at high noon.
Now, my mother administrates an organ transplant unit in Milwaukee–though she is not, nor has been, a doctor of any stripe.
She is Jewish, by birth if not belief; therefore, so am I. When I write, chutzpah peeks out a slimy head from hibernation, eyes the sun’s angle, and blinks. Still, my religion, because of its history of heady, potent culture, fills me with impudence. I find my own roots distasteful. Or, more precisely, my religion disheartens me–because none of it exists, now, except for a well-starched, twice-stewed, odorless, colorless, meal.
Still, the history remains and my blood runs thick with stories, superseding any assimilation to a political or social culture. And in writing, as in life, perspective supersedes everything. Perspective is quality and morality. Perspective is the last wavering note of the shofar on Yom Kippur when you finally realize that all judgments are irrevocable, and absolute.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––
I received a gift. On my seventeenth birthday, I received a book from Janna Sugar. She’s dead, now. When I remember her, I think of her small, soft hands, a wicked smile, and her steady, black eyes. The night of my birthday, we huddled under a playground castle while rain collected in muddy pools under our jeans. She pulled a book from her backpack, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and told me she wanted me to write the inscription.
“This is what you should be reading,” she said. “All the rest–Josh, it doesn’t mean anything.” I was reading Isaac Asimov in those days. She would have loved me, I think, if she had never seen my bookshelves.
“You want me to write an inscription? Isn’t that your job?” I joked.
“Just read,” she said.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Perspective is everything. Each masterpiece, every work of art depends upon these entities: (1) the Artist, (2) the Art, (3) the Observer, and (4) the Lie. Each plays an integral role in any creation:
1. The Writer proposes a hypothesis; every word is a case in the experiment.
2. The Story takes shape or does not; it demands rules and laws that the Writer must follow or fail.
3. The Reader suspends disbelief, enters with an open heart. If the rules of the Story are too
harsh, the Reader will not survive. If the Writer forces the action, cheats the laws of the Story, the Reader will refuse to believe.
4. The Lie is perspective. Each of the entities listed above speaks with a distinct voice, and
knows truth from a single perspective. But the Lie is a single perspective, a unified, unique
voice that represents truth more fundamentally than fact.
A narrative story, whether film or fiction, pursues an outcome through cause and effect, and the outcome must inevitably explain the root cause, the beginning. The root is the Writer. The cause and effect is the Story. The Reader’s experiences in life determine the response, the validity of the creation. The outcome is the unified perspective, the Lie.
When we read, we receive our information directly from the narrator. In movies, the camera dictates the flow of information. Should a movie have a narrator, as does Jesus’ Son, then the viewer must determine who holds the camera. In this example, Billy Crudup plays the narrator/protagonist known as Fuckhead, but if we want a literal description of the action, we cannot trust his senses. A transcendent, intoxicated filter exists between his life and his world, and because the camera remains true to his perspective, we must join with him in sorting out the “truth”. In the back of our brains, we know this is fiction; Denis Johnson wrote the story, he spun it from the void of his own experiences. However, the Lie unifies us with the other essential entities. We have a story.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Throughout the connected stories in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien attempts to rebuild his history. The narrator’s voice speaks from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran suffering from a traumatic stream of memories. By telling stories, he creates a difficult trail through his experiences, subjectively determining truth for himself. In fact, he forces himself not to determine truth by itemizing facts; instead, he tells the stories, then tells them again in a different way, with different characters, different root causes, to uncover a truth that never depends on a literal truth.
Janna died in London. A drunk driver killed her early one morning in April. I was living in Colorado at the time, just a freshman in college preparing for a weekend with friends in Breckenridge. I heard nothing until the following Monday.
But in my mind, I stand with her on the corner of some metal-gray intersection underneath a thick, blowing fog. She flashes a smile, blinks her eyes. And the story ends there–or, rather, it begins, pivoting on agile toes, redirecting the action toward the past, saving her from her future.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
I love writing. I love the paradoxical truth fiction creates. What I love most is the amazement that blooms from the places in a narrative that the author chooses to omit. The reader supplies the imagination, joining with the author in creating a vibrant, unexpected story. And when you realize that movies are a different narrative art, telling a story by engaging the observer in a new way, you understand how human communication has evolved, how simple human beings have found ways to explore their capacity for sharing. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind struck a fundamental chord with my concept of perspective. Our identities are so fragile, and our memories, too, tremble with every new experience. Memento provided me with a fluid example of how a camera can do something so differently than a pencil would. The unifying of perspective is seamless: the writer, the fictional script, the persuasive, tainted voice of narration. Film builds liquid dreams for everyone to see.
My culture abandoned me to a liberal, secular life. But the void exists, demands a perspective. People I meet during my life absorb the characteristics of the stories I know, somehow transforming familiar faces into a single, simple face: likewise abandoned, orphaned from their history, and forced to discover meaning on their own.
I believe fiction creates an audience for our hidden voices, allows us to work out, for ourselves, the misgivings we feel toward the apparent reality of our pasts.
While I have breath, Janna continues to live–I refuse to write the inscription!–and I want to know why. Yes, it's strange that simply speaking cannot solve a mystery like this one while fiction, the creation of new perspective, explains so much more. You see this fundamental truth in the survival of ancient mythologies in stories, in the way the peoples of the world throw their purest souls into the fire for the sake of stories in their bibles. This is what it is: the truth that exists in bibles and mythologies--in stories--is a truth that exists beyond factual truth.
We share stories. We try to understand them. Human beings find the lasting meaning of their lives in no other way.
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Index
Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home
The Phallic Suggestion
Stone Soup Blog Forum
