John Steinbeck and Setting

Been thinking about setting a lot lately, especially in my own work. I'm also reading Steinbeck's Once There Was a War which is providing a lot of necessary musing. Setting, or at least its implementation in a story, can be tricky at times--but it seems to have a direct relation to the believability of a character. A way to make them more present.

I tend to use setting as a means to convey an immediate context for a protagonist's actions. Generally, my stories take place in the same town--an older, darker version of where I grew up. I establish social lines and divisions, often using the town's geography and physical landscape as a way to make them more believable. Whether that works or not is up for grabs.

But setting is not just geography or weather or texture. It is also comprised of the social structure within it, the interaction, beliefs, and idiosyncrasies of its inhabitants.

I don't think a writer can afford to take setting for granted. One cannot simply announce the city in which characters are interacting and expect a comprehensive knowledge from the reader. I find a precise picture is necessary, with intentional details with an agenda (though the agenda can be ambiguous at first). At least that's what I gravitate towards.

An overlapping commentary on how setting relates seems to help as well. Washington Ave. may be full of gangs, but knowing their motivations (for at least some of them) helps prevent the sense of broad-stroke generalizing.

Steinbeck's non-fiction accounts of his experiences during the Second World War bring it together nicely for me. In particular, a description and summary of the people of Dover (small UK town facing France along the narrowest point of the English Channel):

Dover, with its castle on the hill and its crooked streets, its big, ugly hotels and its secret and dangerous offensive power, is closest of all to the enemy. Dover is full of memory of Wellington and of Napoleon, of the time when Napoleon came down to Calais and looked across the Channel at England and knew that only this little stretch of water interrupted his conquest of the world.

Then Hitler came to the hill above Calais and looked across at the cliffs, and again only the stretch of water stopped the conquest of the world. It is a very little piece of water. On the clear days you can see the hills about Calais, and with a glass you can see the clock tower of Calais. When the guns of Calais fire you cans see the flash, while with the telescope you can see from the castle the guns themselves, and even the tanks deploying on the beach.

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed.

Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes about what he was doing. Nothing in the world is as important as his garden and, in other days, his lobster pots. Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm.

Hermann Hesse

"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams--like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."

Bukowski - Crude truths?

Is it ironic that Bukowski made such commentary on other persons? I don't know. But there are days when I am sympathetic to his indictments.

“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”

"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."
—The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, 1998

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”

A Meeting With Joel Thomas Hynes

Met Joel Thomas Hynes today and had a nice chat about writing. The guy is as stand-up as they get. No bullshit with him and if you've read Down to the Dirt you know he's from a rough side of the tracks and unlikely to coddle you when you sit down with him.

What I like about meeting people like him, people with hard, knuckle and bone pasts, is how perceptive they are about others. Not to mention how much empathy they often have for humanity in general. A universal acceptance not always evident from those of us with less-difficult upbringings.

Before we met he read several pages of my latest project, tailoring his advice to what he saw. It appears I'm on the right track (whatever that is), but I thought I'd mention a few suggestions he offered--at least this is how I understood them:

1) Write your ending and paste it into the body of your piece--no matter where you are in the story. Even if the ending changes by the time you're finished, write it into the story anyways. Why? Because it marks an end point, a goal to progress towards.

Writing a story is not always a linear process, so write the ending down as soon as you have an idea of what it is. If you have it and the beginning, you essentially have your story. What is left is bridging the gaps in between.

2) When you get bogged down, try changing POV. Move to 1st person for awhile, even if the rest of the story is told in 3rd. Perception is key--not just how your protagonist perceives others, but also how others perceive him/her.

Often helps flesh a story out, by incorporating the viewpoints of several characters, perhaps making a particular event more (or less) reliable by revealing it through the eyes of many instead of just one.

3) Pare down every sentence to the bare essentials. Man I know I need to work on this more. Consider each sentence and reduce it.

4) Play on the readers' emotions and fears. Whatever you're working on, there will be people who identify (for good or ill) with what your story is conveying. Work with that, make the story use this potential to your advantage. Not pandering to the reader per se but realizing the emotional connection. The trick is to avoid the sentimental or melodramatic. Easier said than done.

5) Find your real title. Seriously. It should embody your entire work down to a few words. I'm working on this right now and it's proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. It also makes me wonder--especially when I look at some book titles on shelves--how many people don't spend enough time on this.

General advice, in some regards, but important I think. Check out some of Hynes' work, if you're interested:

Down to the Dirt
Right Away Monday
Down to the Dirt (film)

J.D. Salinger in the New Yorker

Yes, he's dead. Not that it makes much difference when you think about it. For a man who disappeared from view--at least in the "I want to be with my adoring fans sense"--decades ago, and whose writing disappeared with him, people sure make a fuss.

But that's not to say he couldn't write. Hell, even if you don't like The Catcher in the Rye, you can't take away from its impact on American culture--its ability to speak to the disillusioned on a massive scale. I assume Salinger lived off of the income from this one book alone, as it continues to sell thousands of copies every year.

If you want to see what else he wrote, you're better off heading over to the New Yorker's JD Salinger Archives, where he published thirteen short stories from 1945-1961. I haven't read through them all yet, but it's always a treat when rarities are posthumously offered for public consumption.

I'm sure Salinger would have consulted his lawyers already, trying to find a way to prevent such an affront to his good name--which is what he seemed to consider any effort to circulate his work.

But what a way to create demand. Tell the masses they can't have something and that's precisely what they scramble to get. And you have to admire a man who carried so much disdain for those who wanted what he had to offer. Can you imagine writing something like Catcher and then dealing with the continuous aftermath of disenfranchised youths making pilgrimages to your front door? I'd become a recluse too.

Or maybe that's part of the myth. There are plenty of accounts that indicate Salinger was not the recluse the rest of the world wanted him to be. He probably just got sick and damn tired of being hounded--maybe felt his work was being exploited somehow (I don't know). So he became solitary, which is cool. He wasn't a jerk or a hermit. People in his town knew him--and protected him too. It's an important distinction: solitary vs. seclusion.

But none of that matters now.

Heritage

The Mennonite Historical Society asked me to write a small blurb about what it was like growing up as both a Doukhobor and a Mennonite. That's right, you heard me. I was born half the former and inherited the latter via upbringing in the church. Your guess is as good as mine what this makes me--especially considering I have virtually zero connection to either community these days. But the request piqued my interest.

These two cultures are similar to the point of absurdity at times, but their theologies are such that there is very little shared ground. Whereas Mennonites (Anabaptist) have a heavy emphasis on the "risen Lord", Doukhobors deny this tenet and suggest a working God within all humanity; each person being a reasonable incarnation. So, being asked to somehow identify with both is not an easy thing to rationalize. Well, if I'm focusing on theology at least.

The piece I wrote, a 1300 or so word synopsis, emphasizes the manufactured quality of how one typically views their family heritage--and by heritage I refer to things we inherit from our ancestors (physical attributes, recipes, a propensity for rye etc). A person will arrange their understanding of this heritage in a way that suits them and present it to others as a living mythology--something that explains their inherent traits. But the importance is whatever they want it to be. The weight added solely by their opinion and the historical back-tracking merely a malleable context.

One can say the historical violence of their people has hardened them against compassion. Another with the same story may find themselves overwhelmed with it. The uniformity being in word alone, though each conclusion appears to be valid.

In the Mennonite circle, there is the oft-played game of trying to find a common relative (much like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon) when you meet someone--family being an essential part of Menno identity. If you understand their history and the shit they had to go through, it makes sense--though it can annoy the hell out of you when they make that the hinge point for their existence. Oddly enough, the Doukhobor community carries many of the very same historical traits. And they play the name game too.

When I was growing up, I remember being stopped by complete strangers who had stories about my father--a volunteer fireman who walked into a burning hotel to rescue someone and never came back out. In their stories would be these minute connections: so-and-so's 2nd cousin, how I looked just like my father, how he came from good people, sang in the USCC choir etc. It was alarming then, as I knew nothing of him and had almost no contact with his side of the family, but now I think I get why they wanted to stop me.

Heritage is linear in its chronology. It is a means for those of us in the immediate to retain something of potential from the past. In doing so we add to our own sense of identity. And some of this requires speaking it aloud. But I think what is also important, and sadly lacking from my own perspective, is that one has to remain immersed or connected to this possible past. They have to live their immediate lives with the gravity of those who lived before them. But I don't really do that.

It is of no use for me to say "I am Doukhobor" and demand these words to attach me to the history of these people. Do you know how much Russian I speak? Da, nyet, spaceba, semechki, zhopa. That's it. I love borscht--could it eat every day for the rest of my life. I believe in treating the earth as a living entity, not a commodity. I have short-ass legs and broad shoulders. Doukhobor traits, to be sure, but is that enough to say I am?

If anything, the side of my family I pridefully champion the most is being Dutch. And that's directly because of my Oma and mom, and the exposure I had to their experiences. So maybe that's it then? Exposure. One is connected by the exposure they have to their possible past?

I don't have an answer.

What I do know is that in writing the piece I found myself curious about the aspects of cultural history I didn't know, and somewhat flippant about the stuff I did. I don't look back on my church upbringing with animosity, but I don't exactly aspire to retain any of it. Yet when confronted with the stories of people separated from their loved ones for decades, their children placed in orphanages for "correction", their lives scattered and held together by a singular flame of faith--I am moved to tears.

Maybe that's the heritage yes? That we are sentient and emotionally aware of others stories, and their weight implores us to make sure others hear them too.

Anonymous Postcard In the Mail

Arrived today, with the quote "Arrivederci". But I recognize the handwriting on the back.