This is Madness

As I’ve said before, the dividing line between genius and insanity is nonexistent.

In real life, the boundary between normal and insane is marked by “norms.” Norms are socially agreed rules for acceptable behavior. In America, they include driving on the right side of the road and not picking your nose in public. The British, Irish, Indians, Japanese and Australians have different driving rules. I don’t know if it is good manners anywhere to pick your nose.

These norms also include our beliefs. We believe in gravity. Most of us believe in God. Many people believe it is okay to kill someone else if you’re both wearing different uniforms.

At one time, people believed that earth was the center of the universe. Many people believed that the world was created in six days, five thousand years ago.

Some people still believe both those things.

Really creative people (my definition of genius) ask, “What if that wasn’t true?”

Ptolemy had really tables to explain the movement of planets (Greek for wanderers) assuming that everything else revolved around the earth. Copernicus radically simplified the math by asking, “What if the sun was the center, and not the earth?”

He nearly got burned at the stake for his audacity. Some regarded him as a lunatic. But he was more or less right.

Creative writing requires the same kind of audacity. “What if a child is fully aware at birth, but too inarticulate to express what she experiences? What if a child had perfect recall and could recover those earliest memories for later analysis?”

“Hah,” you say, “no way.”

Way.

When we ask readers to follow us on that journey of discovery, it is called “Suspension of disbelief.” We KNOW what the author says CAN’T be true, but we’ll follow along for the sake of argument.

This can be very hard, both for the author and the reader. I suppose that is what makes literary fiction so challenging. My friend John says you have to work to understand great music. If he was a literature reader, he might say the same thing about that.

I am willing to suspend my disbelief about his claims long enough to write my story, but aside from accepting my premise, my readers should find my words more like Bach than Prokofiev.

Writer’s Blah

Why is writing literary fiction so hard?

I’ve been working at this project for more than two months, and all I have to show for it is twenty pages. Of course, I’ve thrown away at least that many, too. I’ve re-written the first chapter three times without changing what I want to say one whit.

When I’m writing a mystery in my series the pages breeze out of me. I’ll do five, ten pages at a sitting and hardly revise anything when I go back to edit later. I work to a page count, so I often fill in the blank spaces with more description, or maybe a new scene, but after two months the manuscript is complete in all its glory.

This story is different.

At first, I didn’t know where it was going. I have an autistic character who is born totally aware, with a perfect memory. At first he seems like a normal toddler, then … This is my dilemma. I need a story arc, a plot to squeeze my character into. I read what I can find about talented autistic people like Temple Grandin. I read Donna Williams and Dr. Asperger. It only helps a little. I am not writing a textbook, after all.

So I write the last chapter.

While writing mysteries, I type in linear time sequence, from beginning to end. The story is fully formed in my mind. I know who is going to die, when and why. I know what distracting difficulties will tug at my hero. I know what the subplots are all about and what’s going to happen.

It’s as though I’m dictating to myself. I’d be much quicker, turning out three or four books a year like Clive Cussler, if I could only touch type —and if I had an audience eager for the next installment.

This story isn’t like that. It’s like pulling teeth. It’s like I don’t want to eat my spinach, but unless I do, I’ll never become a superhero like Popeye. I’ve got the character in my head. He has a voice. I know the things he is going to experience as he struggles with his autism. I know how he rises into selfhood, and how he will capitalize on his strengths as an adult. If I could only get it into the computer.

Maybe I should quit wasting my time blogging. No one is listening, anyway.

This is my grand delusion. This will be my great work of literary fiction, my key to the big time. After I finish, I intend to flog it until the pages are tattered and torn, just like Kathryn Stockett did with The Help. She says she got over sixty rejections before finding someone to represent her. Now, the book has sold over five million copies.

My delusions are not that grand, but I think I’ve got something big.

If I could only make some progress with the writing …

Nesting Instinct

Did Cinderella have an overwhelming urge to redecorate the castle as soon as the glass slipper touched her foot?

One of my daughters is moving into a new (to her) house. It was built right after the war by the couple who owned it until my daughter bought it. The husband died at age 98. The house probably hadn’t been redecorated since the 1970s, and no major updates had occurred since then, either. It still had one of those skinny 24 inch apartment stoves. This is good news and bad news. The hardwood floors were pristine under forty-year-old carpets. The doors date from an era when locks were an afterthought.

I got roped into a whirlwind redecorating binge. The floors were sanded and stained. Every room on the ground floor was repainted. A new toilet and vanity slipped into the main bath. The kitchen will probably see new floors, cabinets and counters before the year is out.

On the other hand, while I was in Ireland, I visited a fourteenth century ruin that according to local legend had never been occupied. The original owner, a noble of some sort, didn’t like it because it didn’t face the nearby lake. I can’t imagine why he didn’t just have the architect turn it around as soon as he got down off the rack. The adjoining keep, a medieval panic room, was apparently okay. No one worries about the view while the arrows are flying and the siege engine is rumbling up.

The point is, our home is our castle and our castle is our home. They’d better be right, or we’ll wake up grumpy every morning. But in fiction, this never seems to happen. New residents move into perfect, pristine dwellings or miscreants live in totally trashed hovels. We never find the hero, splattered with latex, hefting a roller while his wife natters on that it wasn’t quite the shade of beige she had in mind. No one is in the middle of pasting wallpaper when the home invasion begins or the cops bust the door down looking for your pot stash.

True, Stephanie Plum’s apartment regularly get trashed, blown up or firebombed, but she doesn’t have to repaint. The landlord or the insurance company miraculously steps in, and all is right with the world.

Perhaps I have a warped worldview. I’ve almost always done my own decorating and repairs. Maybe the other 90 percent of the world has an irrational fear of paintbrushes. I don’t know, but Home Depot is always crowded with people who don’t look at all like contractors to me.

Fiction ought to include other forms of domesticity beyond making coffee and serving dinner. I’d like to hear the sound of a roaring vacuum and the swish of an occasional paintbrush.

Writers, are you listening? Get working on that home improvement chapter.

One Way Do Not Enter

Organized religion looms large in each of my books (most recent: Grand Designs). This might be surprising, considering their settings, in and around the auto industry, but in many respects the books are about large, corrupt institutions. Churches in the 1970s fell too frequently into that bucket of slime. Beyond the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, people like Jim Jones showed how far astray moral institutions can get.

Maybe I have a problem with authority. For the better part of two thousand years, churches have held nearly absolute sway over people’s lives, telling them what to think and what they could do. This wouldn’t be too bad if they really had an infallible pipeline to truth, but they have proven time and again to be worse than wrong.

Poor people were robbed of their meager livelihoods by demands for tithes. Women were effectively silenced. Men, especially those in the upper echelons of the hierarchy, enjoyed everything the times could provide, including sexual license and unimaginable wealth, despite their vows of chastity and poverty.

One of the cultural mechanisms that encouraged this to happen was the Western view that there is only one right answer to every question. “I am the one true God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “I am the way, the truth and the light. Walk ye in it.” You get the picture.

This orientation gave authorities the license to suppress all dissent and alternative views as heresy. People who thought otherwise were burned at the stake.

This perspective is very different from the Eastern model espoused by Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Taoism and Shintoism. These systems accept the possibility that there are many paths to enlightenment. There is a saying that a Japanese is Shinto at birth, Christian when marrying, and Buddhist at death.

Talk about covering your bases.

But some things just don’t translate. One of my daughters teaches yoga. She works for a man who fancies himself a swami, a great teacher. While yoga is largely based on Buddhist principles, he seems to have lost sight of the possibility for alternate understandings of truth. He wants all his staff to conform precisely to his interpretation of the way to enlightenment.

He is not alone.

One of the bugaboos of the religious right is that their moral code must be the law of the land. They believe abortion is wrong, so no one should be allowed one, even if only about a third of Americans are practicing Christians. That doesn’t even consider the range of beliefs among Christian sects, some of whom support a woman’s right to control her own fertility.

The bottom line is, churches are fair game. They have amply demonstrated their own corruption. If I choose to vilify them in fiction, what I write contains a ring of truth.

Besides, it’s almost impossible to burn an eBook.

The Sleeper Awakens

Do dreams have plots?

I have a terrible time sleeping. Thoughts swarm through my head like flies on a carcass. I get a measure of relief from my insomnia with a generic sleep aid that costs less than $10 a month. During a recent visited my doctor, I complained that I was lucky to wring six hours out of a dose. He offered me a prescription to the newly released generic version of Ambien CR.

It was over $100 a month! I politely declined my pharmacist’s offer to fill it. I still had two months to go on my previous prescription, but when I went to fill the last month’s supply, she informed me that the prescription had expired. I was in deep doo-doo.

Desperate for a substitute, I took four Benadryl, an antihistamine which is sold over the counter as a sleep aid. I felt like I was hooked directly to house current! My heart raced. Sleep completely eluded me.

When I finally passed into troubled dreams in the wee hours of the morning, my usual strange dreams took a bizarre turn.

It had a better plot than some of my novels. I don’t remember all the details, but the principal character had a problem and attempted various strategies to get some critical paperwork. He was confronted by the usual bureaucratic hassles and was assisted by friends or colleagues.

I read somewhere that we attempt to resolve real conflicts in our lives by reenacting them in sometimes symbolic form during REM sleep. We may not come up with an answer, but we wake up feeling better about whatever was troubling us.

Being an unemployed novelist, my life is relatively unencumbered by bureaucratic encounters of any kind. True, I’ve been arm wrestling with AT&T about getting a DSL connection to the internet, and I had to grovel before various Delta Airlines gate agents to get my granddaughters back to Ireland, but that was all behind me. And the book I’m working on now has no bureaucracy in it at all, yet.

I’m at a loss.

The larger question is, do dreams generally have plots? Most of the ones I remember vividly are more like endless video loops, the same problem keeps popping up, and nothing my dream self can do seems to resolve it.

Maybe I need to recruit a better writer for my dreams, or find out who produced that sleep deprived terror I suffered through last night.

I still don’t have any pills. Let’s hope I fare better tonight without Benadryl or my usual drug of choice.