| IS THERE A BUDGET CRISIS IN THE US? I live and work in Brooklyn, NY. Politicians and pundits have been claiming that the state is broke, and that the only way to balance the city and state budgets is to slash funding for basic social services. Schools, hospitals, home health care…the list goes on and on. As a nurse at SUNY/Downstate – a state operated hospital – I’m told that there will be drastic cuts in reimbursement for patient care. The cuts will require “laying off” (firing) 500 hospital workers. Downstate will not be able to provide basic services to the poor and working class clients that we serve. What’s going on here? The scenario reminds me of that great old joke: Two wealthy middle-aged women are having a drink at a post restaurant. One says, “Did you hear about poor Madge? After her husband died, she turned to prostitution.” “Did she really?” replied the other. “Oh, yes. I mean, she couldn’t touch the principle THE MYSTERY OF STORY By Timothy Sheard Presented to the Creative Writing Program at Northeastern Illinois University October, 2010 There are several mysterious aspects in the writing, reading and talking about stories. There is something inexplicable. Something magical. Something wondrous about the creative process of creating characters and situations, and about reading or viewing those characters as they go about their fictional lives. I’m going to speak about a few of those mysterious aspects, keeping in mind there are many more, and that I encourage the people here tonight to speak about their own views regarding the mystery of story. An open forum is always much more engaging and provocative than a ‘lecture,’ isn’t it? The Mystery of the Story. The first mysterious aspect of story I’d like to discuss is: where do stories come from? How are they created? I can assure you that good stories do not come into existence through a long recipe that calls for a precipitating crisis, a chase and escape, a promise of love, a couple of good fights and a happy-ever- after ending. No, stories don’t happen like that. They come from a mysterious place inside the human heart. The ancient Greeks attributed this source to an immortal goddess, the Muse. They believed that their Must whispered into the poet’s ears, giving him his story. The poet had only to write down the Muse’s words. There are ancient statues and paintings showing a poet (an old man) and a beautiful female angel whispering into his ear. This is why, when we daydream, we speak of ‘musing’ as we let our thoughts drift and float about. This is what happens when you set an interesting character in a scene and put him/her into motion. You seem to watch and listen as the character engages others in the story. It feels as if the story is telling itself, and you are mainly writing it down as it unspools in your mind. One day I was sitting beside two lovely actresses, one young and slender and lovely, the other old enough to be her mother. Suddenly I blurted out, “I’m going to write a play for the two of you; a mother and daughter one-act.” Some time later I ‘listened to my muse’ when I placed an angry daughter in front of her mother’s apartment door waiting for the door to open. I didn’t know why she was angry; I didn’t know who her mother was or even what the story was about. But as I let the door open and visualized the mother, the story unfolded before my eyes. A dead father came into the picture, literarlly, in the form of his photograph from his funeral. Since I'm a mystery writer, I wasn’t surprised to ‘hear’ the two women argue over the cause of the father/husband’s death. It turned out (I discovered), both of the women murdered the poor man on the same day at the same time (I wrote this years before the movie Gosford Park). They began to argue over who could take the credit for his death. Over who got to the man first. The story then developed a nice twist: it turned out the daughter was wearing a “wire.’ She was working with the police to entrap the mother, except she implicated herself in the course of the argument. The story ended with the police banging on the door. Mother and daughter wrap their arms around each other, promising to stand by each other and never betray each other’s trust. But when the police burst into the apartment, the two women push each other away, point at each other and scream in unison, “She did it!” It was a classic tale of betrayal with a nice slice of the absurd. The mysterious part is, how does the imagination summon up these wonderful characters and plot twists and surprises? It is a mystery of the human heart and mind. In writing a novel or short story, once the characters are introduced and their personalities and desires introduced, the characters seem to give the writer their words. Their decisions. Their feelings and even their regrets. The writer’s Muse whispers in his/her ear, and we hurriedly write it down before we forget that funny line; that surprising twist. A second mysterious thing about stories is illustrated by an occurrence that happens to writers. They happen to me, frequently, as a matter of fact. The other day I was walking up to my building at the hospital to start my day. I met a young secretary, who works in the Employee Health Department. She’d read the first three Lenny Moss novels – she loved them – and the night before she read the first two chapters of my new book, SLIM TO NONE. The young woman looked at me and said, “Man, that Carlton is such a damn fool! He makes me so angry, I want to slap him upside the head. “Why’d he have to go inside the store and let his picture be taken like that? I don’t know how Lenny can put up with him!” My reader was so engaged with my character Carlton that he had her blood boiling the next morning. How is this possible? How can our readers become so emotionally bound to the characters that they feel loyal and protective of the protagonist and fury at an apparent betrayal? Another example. Some time ago a nurse in the AIDS clinic stopped me in the hall with a smile. She said, “Oh, you won’t believe what happened the other day. I was going into the basement to collect some records and I started to get scared. I was thinking about what happened to Lenny in the first book, when he goes into the dark basement and the killer is waiting for him, and I got gooesbumps. I was really scared” How does this happen? It is something mysterious and magical. In fact, scientists who study the human brain have learned that when we sit in a darkened theatre watching a movie, our brain state resembles the state of dreaming. I believe that when we are immersed in a good story, we enter that dream-like state, so the story becomes as vivid as a powerful dream that still haunts us hours after we awake. It works for the writer as much as the reader. I wrote a scene in the second book where Lenny rises to speak at the funeral of a beloved co-worker. As I pictured him standing before his friends, I knew exactly what Lenny would say. He told a joke. It was a perfect Lenny moment, and it came to me as if Lenny himself was speaking. Not only that, but I cried when I wrote that scene, I was so moved by Lenny’s words. There’s an old saying among writers: “No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading.” I was moved by Lenny’s words that seemed to come from him. Or was it myy muse whispering in my ear? My unconscious? My opioid receptors in my brain? Who knows, but it’s wonderful when it happens. I wrote another scene in the second book. It’s Lenny’s first date since his wife died, referenced in the first book. The course of the date seemed to unfold before me and all I had to do was listen to the charcacters and write down what they said and did and felt. What strange alchemy produces the gold of a vivid scene? A scene that is true; that is real. And, yes, I cried when I wrote that scene, too. How do we become so emotionally enmeshed in the characters that we react as powerfully as if they were ‘real’ people in our actual lives? It is truly a mysterious process. A third mystery of story is, How does a man or woman become himself or herself? How do we create our sense of identity and, more importantly, our sense of right and wrong? How do we forge our moral compass? By adolescence we have clear ideas about good and evil; about what constitutes a good person and what makes a bad person. I’m going to go out on an existential limb here – it’s my philosophy so take it for what it’s worth. I believe most strongly that we are all in a sense ‘fictional characters.’ We are works of art, as it were. We are players in our own internal drama as we think to ourselves what we will do and say. And when we dream of the life that we want to achieve. What does this mean? To me, it means that when we are children we are told stories. Children’s stories. Hero stories. Epic stories. And we learn through them the appropriate role for a boy or a girl; a man or a woman. The young boy hears of heroic knights, soldiers, adventurers...private eyes. San Spade and Philip Marlowe – knights without armor. And through hearing those stories we learn what it means to me a person with moral principles. A good person. We also learn, perhaps wrongly, that if we do exhibit those qualities of courage and honor and loyalty, we’ll find true love. The existentialists made this point long ago. They say that we create ourselves each day when we arise and begin to speak our inner dialogue with our self, And within some limits of our Pavlovian conditioning, we are free to change who and what we are. We can evolve. We can become a better person. Or become a monster. But we create our persona every day, and we play out our inner dramas according to the dramatic templates that we heard and watched on TV and in the movies as children. Remember, it’s not uncommon to refer to some unusual friend or associate as “a character.’ We are all character in our own story line, and we are engaged with other characters who write their scripts in concert, or in opposition, to ours. So in a real sense, we can say that ‘fictional’ characters are ‘real’, because they move us so deeply; they engender such fierce loyalty. While we mortal flesh and blood folks are living ‘fictions’ imitating works of art and trying to live up to the heroic standards of our favorite storied heroes and heroines. Mysterious. Very mysterious this life and art There’s another mystery that is commonly revealed in the crime story, but is equally revealed in many good novels: Pride and Prejudice, for example. When the detective reveals who the murderer is, the thrill that we experience is not merely the solution of a puzzle. No, what’s gives the mystery its emotional power is the realization that a character we thought was sane or harmless or innocent, really innocent in their soul, was capable of cold blooded murder. We remember what we tend to forget every day, that people are rarely what they seem on the surface. People are much more than what they reveal in every day discourse. Some are monsters; many are saints. Many have hidden talents and gifts and have performed noble deeds that we never imagined them capable of performing. And yet they do. Not only are they much more than they appear, but we even discover at times that we are more than we thought we were. That we can scale heights we believed were beyond our powers. Can feel deep feelings of love or hatred which we believed were not in our nature. This is another part of the mystery of story: the revelation of the depths and dark uncharted waters of the human spirit. This revelation of the depths of the human heart (for good or evil) is what gives the mystery story its power and delight. It’s not the puzzle that’s solved, it’s the realization that a harmless seeming person is capable of brutal murder, and a less than impressive person can show enormous strength and fortitude standing up to that evil. And finally, for my fifth and last mysterious quality of story, I’m going to go way out on a limb. I’m going to argue that novelists – storytellers – are secret social engineers. We are part of the social mechanisms that shape our sense of right and wrong; legal and illegal; fair and unfair, and that as we lure you into our stories, we hook you into believing the dominant, accepted values of that society. But what if the values in our society are unjust? What if they are unfair? Oppressive? Deadly? Doesn’t the writer share some responsibility for perpetrating those injustices? I think so. Here is how we do it. When I invite you to read my story, I implicitly, and surreptitiously, cajole you into adopting the point of view of my protagonist. It’s a little bit like a hypnotic suggestion (remember the dream state in the movie theatre). The more you love and want to be like my hero, the more you are willing to accept his moral values, at least during the reading. In short, by luring you into perceiving the world through my hero’s eyes, I win you to my hero’s world view. That’s a very sneaky thing to do to the reader. Because my sympathetic protagonist may believe something that is not good for the majority of the people in the society at large. It may even be a moral code that results in starvation, oppression and death for many. Consider the crime series Law and Order. Like all police procedurals, as well as virtually all private eye stories, the detective investigates a simple act of murder. One individual taking another’s life. That’s wrong, so the detective strives to uncover the killer and bring him to justice. And when the guilty party is apprehended, and in Law and Order convicted, the reader/viewer feels a lovely sense of relief. And a dep satisfaction that all’s well with the world, because justice has been served. In the words of Agatha Christie, the social fabric, torn by the brutal act of murder, has been repaired and we can all sleep peacefully in our beds. But why do the police in Law and Order never investigate corporate crimes that destroy millions of lives? The subprime mortage brokers peddled junk securities they knew would one day be worthless. But as long as they unloaded them before the bubble burst, they made millions of dollars while in the end millions of real people suffered: loss of home, loss of jobs from the recession: loss of family from the stress. Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. Crime. The list goes on and on. Why isn’t the behavior of these greedy, cold-blooded killers immoral and illegal? Because, I maintain, the moral code in our society is written by the rich and powerful, and they write that code just like the rules of the game Monopoly, to ensure that they remain above the law. Fat and rich and untouchable while the suckers go homeless and hungry. Sometimes crime writers hold up a mirror to those immoral power elites. John Grisham. George Pelecanos. Stieg Larsson. and others show greedy, sadistic individuals, a few of whom are brought to justice. But the system that gave them carte blanche to wreck communities in order to maximize their gain is never put on trial. And the mystery of why writers such as us rarely, if ever, challenge the rules of the game of life that produces so much poverty and suffering and early death is one that I hope all readers ask. Ask us. Ask me! Challenge us to look more deeply into the woof and weave of our ‘social fabric,’ and to ask if there aren’ t criminals who are never arrested, but should be, if only we wrote our stories to call them what they are: murderers. Timothy Sheard, speaking at Northeastern Illinois University, October, 2010. |
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