Nothing in Isolation

"Nothing exists in isolation in the forest."

I was famously sitting in my family's cabin by the Allegheny River for the coldest six-month stretch of my life. Late fall, I watched the ice gather on the river in small patches and form fields, which themselves impinged on the shore like hour-long car wrecks, until the water was frozen solid. I was a college dropout and a college grad. For an entire month, the high temperature did not rise above freezing. I was a steel-mill worker and a hoddie. I was also an ex-all those things and, though I couldn't know it at the time, a soon-to-be grad student. Mostly, I spent that winter reading and writing. I had visits from friends and family on the weekend, but spent four or five days each week, not hearing a human voice or seeing a human face (unless you count the folks on the other side of the river or the characters on the VCR tapes).

One of my favorite programs to watch at the time was a Nature Channel or Discovery Channel or National Geographic Channel series about the world. I forget which channel, clearly, but I do know that the series explored the tundra, the polar caps, and South American rain forests, specifically, as well as a few other sweeping geographical generalizations. I learned a lot about the planet. My favorite detail came when a flock of toucans, who had apparently eaten some sour berries, ate mud from a cliff. The mud had no nutritional value, but provided a base to counter the negative effects of the acidic berries. Ha! Not a pharmacist or an M.D. among them. Parrot, I thought, heal thyself! I knew they weren't parrots, though, so it was a moot point.

Later in the same episode, the announcer in a conversation about one of the most complex ecosystems in the known universe says, "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." I paused and rewound and played that line at least a dozen time. "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." "Nothing," the announcer says, "exists in isolation in the forest."

I had payed money for these tapes. That line was scripted. It's not as though the announcer were commentating a live broadcast of the forest. He had been payed to say, very specifically, "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest."

I felt duped.

*     *     *

On the other hand, I love Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. She insists that we all slow down and read and recall what it's like to savor what we read and to learn from what we read such that when we read again or when we read something else or when we write, we can enjoy again what we have read in other great works. More than insist, she gives us permission to read thus.

She begins her book by insisting on close reading in her chapter 1 titled "Close Reading." She goes on to focus on how a story might hinge or develop or change entirely as the result of a single word in her chapter 2 titled "Words." Chapters 3, 4, and 5 -- "Sentences," "Paragraphs," and "Narration," respectively -- grow larger in scope, but focus on language with the same kind of intensity as her previous discussion of close reading and words. "Character," "Dialogue," "Details," and "Gesture" -- chapters 6-9 -- encourage us to consider carefully the myriad ways in which an author develops a piece of fiction through such such devices.

My students are to come to class today, ready to discuss "Character." In the chapter, Prose discusses The Marquise of O— by Heinrich Von Kleist, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. Yet another beautiful conversation by Prose in which she block quotes huge swaths of the texts and discusses how they variously develop character through dialogue, thought, dress, narration, perception, and other methods.

Something that struck me about twenty pages into her chapter, the impetus for this post, in fact, is that, for a moment, I forgot the title of the chapter. During her discussion, I lost sight of whether this was a chapter on narration or gesture, details or dialogue. I've read the book before, enough to recall lessons from each of the various chapters. In reading the long passages she had quoted from the text, I found myself applying Prose's lessons on several of the writerly things* her text addresses. What a pleasure, I thought, to apply so much of what I've learned to just this one passage! Then, of course, the terror set in that I would not be able to talk to my students this afternoon intelligently about character, and would end up, again, tangentially describing the glories of free indirect discourse in narration. The horror, it was as if something buried deep in my literary subconscious had uttered, the horror.

*     *     *

The summer after my longest, coldest Pennsylvania winter became the hottest, driest of my life. I started working for a temp agency in April and ended up cleaning the scrap pits at a machine shop for three weeks in June. There was a stretch of thirteen days where the high temperature each day was above a hundred. On my lunch breaks, I sat on a bucket chewing tobacco and watched The Wasatch Mountains burn. I didn't have much invested in saving the world, so I thought, Burn, baby, burn, at times, and at others, thought, Shouldn't someone put that out?

At one point, in the machine shop, my boss got frantic and put me in charge of making rabble arms -- pieces for a ten-story industrial** furnace used to heat and slowly cool giant hunks of metal used in the construction of submarines. The furnace was in Brazil. I was in Salt Lake City. The submarines would end up in the ocean. The rabble arms were made of some strange sort of concrete I'd never seen before or sense, the powder a finer consistency than even sifted flour. I mixed the mortar and poured buckets full of a million tiny metal needles into the mixture. I have no idea why. For all I know, I might have been making those car-wide curbs that keep cars from wondering off in parking lots. I was famous in the machine shop for chewing tobacco and not knowing shit, so I continued to not ask questions.

Still that announcer haunted me, even then, even 1957 miles away from where I'd first heard his narration, even months later and a hundred degrees hotter. "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." The awfulness. The sweeping generalization. The vagueness. The obviousness. The statement made more sense to me at that moment -- in the desert building a product of steel and stone that will build a product that will build a product that will swim through the deepest oceans -- it made more sense and sounded more astute than any other statement I had ever heard.

And, today, here I am in Southeastern Ohio, reading Prose, thinking of a machine shop in Northern Utah, wondering about a text: is it character? is it narration? is it dialogue? And this, traditionally, has been the hardest part of teaching writing -- creative, composition, literary -- for me: you can't separate out the parts. You have to learn and grow and write very intensely, applying all of what you've learned and grown into and written, into every document as it comes out before you. Nothing exists in isolation in literature. Good dialogue is good character development. Good setting is good plot. Good generalization is good detail. Nothing exists in isolation in literature. We separate it out to talk about its pieces. We look at the toucans and we look at the sloths. We live in the desert or we live in the hills. But nothing exists in isolation in literature.

*Prose doesn't define or describe how she separates the chapters, so I don't know what she'd want to call these things -- they're not themes or devices or techniques, necessarily, nor are they not not those things either.

** For the record, I realize that if the furnace is ten stories tall, I probably don't have to mention that it's industrial. I'm in too much of a hurry to bother with redundancies.

Why Writing Is Impossible: A Quiet Diatribe Concerning the Craft Delivered in the Form of an Innocuous Series of Blog Posts

It's hard to learn to write again for all the reasons I've mentioned -- fear, shame, humiliation -- but the emotional difficulties also help to bring into clear relief the technical difficulties. I've been thinking about some of them, some of the reasons writing is so impossible. This is not the first reason or the most important; it's just the first reason I wrote down.

Consider the paragraph, for instance. Francine Prose writes a twenty-two page lyrical, informative, passionate, impassioned, telling, showing, fun, descriptive discussion of the paragraph in her book Reading Like a Writer. In the chapter, title "Paragraphs" (Oh! I love this book), we learn or relearn everything we've ever known about paragraphs but never thought to ask. The writing is a delight. The passages are a delight.

I'm rereading the chapter right now, thinking about how I will begin a conversation about paragraphs with my creative writing class this afternoon, thinking about how I break my own paragraphs, thinking about my favorite paragraph writers (Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Johnathan Kozol, bell hooks) -- yes, I'm just dorky enough to have favorite paragraph writers -- thinking about what makes their paragraphs great.

Prose delivers great advice from great writers, all guided, of course, by her own love of paragraphs, specifically, of writing at large. At certain points, as with the previous two chapters "Words" and "Sentences," we realize that the key to any good paragraph (or word or sentence) is magic. Or, as I like to call it, God. Or, as I like to call it so that atheists and religious folks don't get offended and agnostics don't have something new to ponder, society speaking through us. Or the muse or the Aeolian Harp. Or great writers of the past. I was right at first: all good writing moves are magic.

And then Prose inserts a passage from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style -- certainly, every creative writer's favorite grammar book, despite its many flaws. The passage ends, "Moderation and a sense of order should be the main consideration in paragraphing." Thank you, Strunk and White, for creating this tiny book of writerly advice. It has served me, it has served my students, it has served us all in more ways than we'll ever know.

But "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ? What the hell are those? This passage marks the closest I've ever come to feeling like Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he waits patiently for weeks and finally receives his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring and deciphers the secret message "DON'T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE." "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ?

I feel like I should apologize to my creative writers in class today for sharing this drivel. "Strunk and White," I'll tell them, "aren't always like this. They're really good guys when you get them alone." Writing, all writing, but specifically creative writing, more specifically fiction, should be human, right?, should be flawed and well-intentioned and beautiful, and, above all, compelling. Paragraphs should be tiny novels or winding narrations with, yes, of course, topical sentences, even though none of us knows what those are, really. And, yes, they should vary in length and intensity. And, yes, like any element of craft -- from dialogue to setting to gesture to title -- they should do more than one thing. Paragraphs should be voice driven as determined by the narrator. Their look, size, density should be dictated by the story, rather than the other way around. How they look when set beside other paragraphs is key -- e.g. a short paragraph in between several long ones can be striking and lovely and carry as much weight as the big ones. Paragraphs, like stanzas, must focus us intensely on a single moment, must control the pacing of a story, must describe huge sweeping changes in time and space -- the paragraph must be able to navigate the present moment as well as guide a reader into the future or past. And because of all the demands on paragraphs, a writer absolutely must have an overarching sense of order -- not necessarily as an impetus for the story, but it must be present as the drafts develop narration. Order, for sure, and a writer must balance lyricism with scientific presentation, the past with the future, long paragraphs with short paragraphs -- a writer must moderate her passions and flare with the rules of language and a knowledge of literary history. In short, the two key elements of a paragraph are moderation and a sense of order.

I hope that clears this up for everybody, and, again, give Strunk and White a chance. They mean well, even when they're making sweeping generalizations about what you need to be a writer.

Francine Prose says all this much better than I, and I have learned more than I can ever convey from her book, but perhaps the most important writerly tidbit I can take away from her book: "Though once again, as with sentences, merely thinking about 'the paragraph' puts us ahead of the game, just as being conscious of the sentence as an entity worthy of our attention represents a major step in the right direction." Some ancient Greek wrote, though he was probably not the first to think or say, "To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know -- that is true knowledge."

See what I mean?

Smoke and mirrors, slight of hand, misdirection: all within a grounding sense of reality. Magic.

Reading Like a Writer

Okay, so, clearly, the last five months have been rough on this writer. I'm not ashamed to admit, I've had my first bout with "writer's block," whatever that is. Whatever that stems from. Down the road, certainly, when asked about writer's block, I have to imagine myself saying, "Yes, I had that once, it was caused by the loss of my first novel," and that might be true, or it might be a cop out, or, most likely, it will be like this: I doubted writing for a while, the way some folks doubt their religion, but I worked and I prayed and I read and I sat down and pounded the keyboard and pounded the keyboard . . . and here I am today.

Perhaps it will be part of my acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize . . .

Certainly, by then, I will have got over my need to use so many elipses.

At any rate, I am becoming a writer again. That is, in large part, what this blog is about. The recurring narrative, of course, is about loss, but the bigger idea, the one that will carry on after the sad-sac recounting of the early life and times of Scrap, is that I am learning how to write again.

And, and I have to stress this, it's not just happening for me. I am not just waking up in the morning feeling a little more like a writer each day. No doubt Michael Jordan never stepped back onto the court after a month or two of hardly touching a ball and leap from the foul line (did I just compare my writing to MJ's basketballing? Oh, my. I'm getting out of control). It isn't just happening. I'm reading; I'm writing; I'm seeking out my writerly spirituality (again, very similar, I imagine, to folks who follow other religious practices).

Will I please be more concrete and specific, please?

"Afraid of running out of books," Francine Prose writes in Reading Like a Writer, "I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French." I've been reading books about reading and writing is one thing I'm doing. I have no fear of running out of books, but I love Prose's notion here. I love that she gives herself permission to slow down her reading: clearly, she is not suggesting to read less or to read sloppily, lazily, half-assedly -- she is suggesting we look more closely at every word, to make connections, to love the work. Again, I'm thinking of sports: in all my time around sports, I have never heard a coach say, "Get your ass out there and shoot 10,000 foul shots as fast as you possibly can!" Rather, we ask an athlete to slow down, to perfect a particular motion, to focus on Feet Elbows Eyes Followthrough (FEEF? That doesn't sound right).

I taught this book in the fall and am teaching it again and am taking this advice to slow down. The easy thing for me, at this point, might be to skim through the text, focus on a few notions that I underlined, checked, starred or circled last quarter and summarize the rest. But I don't think that would be as good for my writing.

At the same time, I don't think I have it in me to write a 500 word blog post every time I find a sentence I like. Or do I . . . ?

No. I don't.