THE writing life
The X-Factor
By Sheila Quealey
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”
― John Steinbeck
I go for a walk and then a drive in an attempt to clear my head and open a pathway to the missing word, the elusive one that is on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my consciousness, the one that I cannot go forward in my story without. It is the word that will convey what I need it to, the only word. It needs to describe quietness but not silence, peace in the outdoors. I go to the shelf and lift the thesaurus, Roget’s, a gift as an undergraduate. I begin the search and two hours later I find myself having made a substantial detour through many pages, roaming from word to word. I come upon tenebrose and I love the sound of it so much I jot it down in my writing journal. Two lines above it is tendril, and I see in my mind’s eye, a wisp of hair on a hot day, the delicate tie of a creeping plant. Unsure if tendril is the right word for the tie on a creeping plant, I leave the book and go to the Internet and search. I find that I am correct but I also meet the words bine, (which twine their stems around a support) and vine (which use tendrils, suckers and other methods) and I love that I have learned the difference. All the while tenebrose, rolls around my mind like a marble until it settles in a corner waiting for the day when I will need it.
Later, Arcadian, the word that I was looking for hours ago comes to me. As I put the thesaurus back on the shelf a clipping from an old New Yorker falls to the floor. It is a poem by Eamon Grennan, entitled A Few Facts. I sit down in my reading chair and try to remember when and why I choose to keep this poem. I read it and phrases strike me like a bell, Cremona daisies, a cairn of bulky logs, the cats dazzled and I am filled with awe and admiration but with a particular kind of joy too. I am afraid to look at the clock knowing that hours and hours have passed and I have an assignment due.
“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt,” Audre Lorde once said. The study of narratology confirms this. For generations, scholars have been formulating structures to analyse the elements that make up a story using ancient myths as a basis to prove what Lorde and so many others now know: all the stories in the world have already been told. As a creative writing teacher and a student on an MA in Creative Writing course this should concern me. If all the stories have already been told then why have I chosen the path of a writer? Is being a logophile enough?
It is difficult to explain why a single word or metaphor can evoke such wonderment in a reader and why that is so difficult to achieve as a writer. During my research, I have spent a good deal of time studying the theories of Aristotle, Saussaure, Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Cambell and Barthes. I have enjoyed learning about the evolution of the taxonomy of Structuralism, Semiotics, and Linguistics. I formulated a nice, neat chronological history of narratology, but the more I read the more I realize that while these categories and templates, like Campbell’s frequently used Hero’s Journey, are useful to the writer they are not what makes a great writer. But what is the secret? Or is there, as Steinbeck suggests, magic to telling a story? As a reader, I know the ingredients. Every recipe is different of course but all require the very careful measure of language. Pushed to explain eloquently the feeling a well-written story evokes in me, I find myself unable to do so.
Are writers skilled or talented? In his book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field; his research found that talent had little to do with accomplishment (although the “practitioners” do tend to fall in love with their practise transforming it from a chore to a passion). If this is true than anyone willing to put in the time can become a successful anything. Can this apply to writing?
Like my Roget detour earlier, I leave the theorists and turned to Google. I search the words “beauty” and “talent” and “skill” to get a broader response. I come across a TED talk featuring the singer, Sting. His talk is about his struggle with writer’s block. He jokes that his Faustian pact may have expired and he finds himself without inspiration. An artist who has been so prolific in the past finds himself unable to write a single song. Sting’s story for TED was crafted. There was a definite structure: a beginning, middle and an end. He used the extended metaphor of a shipyard, and he weaves his newly inspired songs through, adding depth and emotion to the overall presentation. It is a moving experience for the audience (me) and much of this is because of the skill of his storytelling. But Sting, who has been writing songs for over thirty years has surely exceeded Gladwell’s “10,000 – Hour – Rule” threshold. Yet, despite his long and successful career, he hits a creative wall and finds himself mute for years. Why doesn’t a formula work to fix this?
Richard Seymour, a product designer, asks in his TED talk, “How Beauty Feels…”, if we think beauty or if we feel it. He tells a story about an eighteenth-century watchmaker who engraved words on the backside of the balance wheel. When asked why he would do this, when nobody would ever see the words, the old man replied, “God will see it.” Seymour had a physiological response to this story. He says, “Beauty is in the limbic system of the beholder,” the system where we feel before our brain can manipulate us into contextualizing. This response was involuntary, not because he is a religious man, because he isn’t, but because the beauty of the act moved him. Seymour organises his response to beauty into three categories: poignancy, a triggering of a big emotional response, (which can be happy or sad); pathos, an appeal to our emotions; and triumph, a feeling of transcendence. He experiences these feeling when he looks at a MV Augusta motorbike. I feel this when I read this passage from Donal Ryan’s story Tommy and Moon,
“The hawk flew in one summer evening wet with blood, full of shotgun pellets, and died. It had come back to him to see could he save it again, and he couldn’t, and his breath went from him, and his reason for a time, and the world tilted a bit and never fully righted.”
This deceptively simple, brief excerpt causes my breath to catch in my throat. In these few short sentences, Ryan manages to create an absolute connection between the reader and this fictional character. It creates, for me, all the feelings that Seymour talks about in relation to beauty. Each time I read this I hurt with empathy for Tommy.
Worried that I am going off track, I return to academia and to the philosopher, Edmund Burke, who, in his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime. Beauty, Burke says, is something that moves us, something that is “small, smooth, attractive and delicate.” The sublime is vast, gloomy, dark and threatening. This would suggest that there is no pleasure in the sublime but Burke argues the opposite. He says that the sublime has the ability to affect us on a visceral level. He says there is a delightful terror in standing at the precipice of a mountain or witnessing a storm. This delight comes from the sheer power of the sublime experience and the exhilaration that brings with it. Burke also refers to the sublimity of words. The incredible awe the perfect combination can create, “This idea or this affection caused by a word, which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a great degree of the sublime; and this sublime is raised yet higher by what follows, a ‘universe of death.’”
The idea that a word can be beautiful, terrible or ugly is an odd concept – how does one measure this? The beauty of a single word is quite subjective but this passage from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, meets Burkes requirement of the sublime for me. The litany incurs the weight of its meaning and beauty even in its ultimate tragedy:
“A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn’t know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, a pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewellery, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle, in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Pauls A’S face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart.”
I can’t resist including Roland Barthes theory of pleasure. In his book, The Pleasure of the Text, he compares the experience of reading a good book to a sexual orgasm. He makes a distinction between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss). For him, the text and the reader are partners. He demands that the author write something that “must prove to me that it desires me…” This is quite an edict; how do you provide “jouissance” for a reader?
The Paris Review archives house pages and pages of interviews with established, professional, and successful writers discussing their process. Faulkner advises, “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory.” While Hemingway says it is all about, “Getting the words right. Sometimes, there’s no other way to put it. When we’re writing, we can analyse everything and apply every skill and trick and device that we know. We know how to write, and how to edit, and what should work and what shouldn’t. But sometimes we just can’t get the words right, and we have to keep working at them until the do, whenever that may be.”
Does any of this help me to write a story? Do the definitions and classifications, the structures and elements, the advice and the warnings serve to improve my writing? I look around my study where I have sat for hours on end trying to figure out the secret, the X-Factor, to writing the perfect story, to becoming a great (or even good) writer. The spines of the books that fill my shelves, floor to ceiling stare back at me: James Joyce, Claire Keegan, Joseph Conrad, Sara Baume, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton. I can chose anyone of them and apply the theory of narratology to an analysis of their contents. Or I can pick one that catches my eye, one that I haven’t read for twenty years maybe, or one that I bought just yesterday and lose myself in the intangible something that these writers possess while I continue my apprenticeship at the words of the masters and hope that the story will come.