Absolute Gentleman

I had never heard of Noy Holland before the conference at UMASS, and didn’t know that it was, in fact, she who inadvertently flicked (flicked?) tossed her long blonde hair behind her, draping it onto my bare knees during the Bachelder/Davis conversation.

As a participant in the conference, I chose to attend certain “craft sessions” before arriving. I don’t remember choosing Holland’s, and I don’t think I would have, considering it dealt with first lines in fiction. But like always, I was skeptical, then surprised about its usefulness. She started out by saying:

“If you wrote down every first line you ever created, what would it say about your tendencies…”

This isn’t a direct quote, even though I made it look like it, but you get the idea. Here are some of my first lines.

When it wasn’t enough to watch Superfly Snuka soar from the top rope, or watch Mad Dog Vachon slap a sleeper hold on a dazed and disoriented patsy, we created our own neighborhood wrestling league on our little piece of Long Island.

We used to hang out at a bar called The Melrose.

This is the only photograph I have of Erin.

I don’t tell many people that I was nineteen before I had sex for the first time.

Today I’m in my son’s room before I leave for work, knelt over one of his open dresser drawers, looking for a fashionable outfit so I can dress him.

The one thing I have always wanted to avoid is fashioning opening lines just to be clever or varied. The best first lines I probably ever crafted were ones I never intended to be first lines. I used to attend a writers’ group with a woman who was brilliant at advising where a story should start, based on the text I had already written. There’s a person like this in every writers’ group. It’s the easiest comment to make without actually analyzing the writing. This woman, though, was really good.

So what do my first lines say about my sensibilities as a writer?

• I write almost exclusively in the first person.
• My first lines break into a conversation of sorts with the reader. This goes along with the voice I’ve developed and my philosophy that my writing is at its best when I write as if I’m telling a story to someone.
• In terms of what the lines do, it seems to vary. I’m foreshadowing action in some, while in others I introduce a setting…
• I like to think my sentences are varied in length naturally.

Holland had us examine some of Joy Williams’ first lines, and I find them to be similar to the approach my students take when they write their first stories. The first lines work, but they seem to be too easy, or too basic in how it interacts with the reader. Take this first line from Joy Williams’ story, “Marabou”:

The funeral of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly.

I’m giving Williams the benefit of the doubt because she’s widely admired, but I don’t agree with how I perceive she’s treating her readers here. It’s as if she expected a new set of readers to take her work on, and she’s employing very basic strategies to rope them in. Maybe I’m making too much of it, but I would not have chosen this line as representative of a good first line. Here’s another, from her short story “Honored Guest”:

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.

Here’s another example of what I perceive as writing to a new audience. This feels like the start of a story for new teenage readers, and it has little to do with the reference to eleventh grade. If the sentence stopped at the end of the first independent clause, it would have the feel of the first example. When Williams added the rest of it, it felt like that bouncy kind of voice, despite the subject matter, that you get in young adult novels. Am I wrong?

On some level, probably. Holland didn’t present this craft talk to show us how to start our stories, but to survey the ways good writers have started their stories. Her handout was a two-pager that included about forty first sentences, all organized according to categories she created. It was an interesting read. I’ll fax you a copy if you want to see what she did.

Noy Holland opened a discussion on the first lines of poetry, and one of the participants said that she measures the value of a poem, or buys a collection of poetry, based on what she thinks of the last lines of each poem. This fascinated me even more when Holland reacted as if it were common knowledge.

So I guess it’s the first five pages of the novel, the first line or paragraph of the short story, and the last line of the poem.

Some other little paraphrased fascinations of note during her session

A story should occur within itself rather than be dependent on continually added events on the end of each plot point. This could be the major difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. If genre fiction is dependent on plot twist and turns and the next thing happening, literary fiction is partly dependent on being contemplative about the specific plot points. For example, I would label my story, “Keys” as literary because it takes a very simple plot and constantly analyzes it.

On strength versus reservation: Writing a good story, or a good section of a story, is like great singing in an opera. A huge reserve of power releases itself in a controlled fashion through a small opening. I’m obviously paraphrasing, but I love this concept. There has to be an incredible amount of power behind the words, but the words have to be used precisely and in a controlled way.

Here’s an entry from the Juniper Writers Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. Alma Mater to many legendary scholars and thinkers, the greatest of whom being Doctor Marcus Camby. That boy can play, has played, ball. He a baller. He a Rhodes Baller.

I’m here and I feel out of place, which is not surprising: I feel out of place in most places. At this point, I’m like Crash Davis, without the minor league homerun record.

People are good. I don’t like people, but recognize that people are good and useful. When I decided to speak to people here, I found them genuinely good. Here’s the thing about conferences at this point: People here are either 90 or they’re 24. Or there’s a youth writing conference here, in which case the participants are teenagers.

Lydia Davis is one of these good people, and she visited campus to give a reading and an informal talk about writing, etc. Her ‘interviewer’ was Chris Bachelder. He wasn’t really an interviewer, though, and I appreciated that. He got the hell out of the way and let Lydia meander through her genius unfettered, as opposed to me, who is very much the hell in the way of this entry. I am fettering the progression of this entry.

Lydia knows me from her generosity. She and Amy Hempel came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts (50 miles from where I am now) and did a benefit reading for my educational nonprofit, Word Street. There was dinner afterward with Lydia and Amy, and I have chosen not to write about it because I loved the moment and want it to be mine for as long as possible.

I’m not ready to write about it yet.

Before what was to be an interview before a live audience, I watched Lydia talk some with Chris, most likely doing some last minute preparation for what was to come. Lydia saw me and waved quite vigorously. I know the reason for this was that she knows how oddly uncomfortable I am in most situations and especially in light of the debacle at the Brix Wine Bar.

My wife and I had our annual date night a few months ago, and we decided to pretend to be refined palates and sniff some wine corks at Brix. It was three or four days, maybe a week, before the big reading I organized, featuring Davis and Hempel, and the maitre d’ seated us just about on top of Lydia Davis and her husband, the artist Alan Cote. I knew Lydia from a master class in fiction I took with her at UAlbany, but that was a long time ago, at least a year, so when I sat down next to her, I didn’t think it was appropriate to say hello, thought I’d be imposing on a meal I shouldn’t have been a part of in the first place. Yes, I have issues. I’m in the process of getting help.

So I never said hello to her, and to make matters worse, since I thought she may have noticed me and wondered why I didn’t say hello, I emailed her to tell her what I did, that I was sorry. She emailed back and recounted the entire evening, from the things we ordered to the awkward conversation with the waiter. She thought the whole thing was humorous and put me at ease once and for all.

So when she waved vigorously to me two days ago, I think she knew what she was doing.

Like I said, she’s one of the good people.

Without further delay, here are my disjointed notes on Lydia Davis’ interview with Chris Bachelder:

Lydia read the dictionary in 1971, it was a collegiate dictionary, maybe a Merriam Webster. She still references a worn copy of the dictionary constantly – not for shedding light on a general meaning of a word, but to find the precise meaning of a word. She also regards etymology as essential.

The best writing instruction she ever absorbed was not from writing teachers, but from one or two writerly friends who would read her work microscopically close.

It takes a long time to become individual as a writer. I’m assuming she’s talking about voice and style.

Constraints in writing are often more useful than freedom.

Interesting exercises: using the thesaurus to change words — consequently rhythm; diction, obviously. There are no synonyms, after all, because words aren’t the same, each is more or less precise.

Ideology doesn’t drive her work. Davis is receptive to external elements and, usually, her ideology appears beneath or within (these are partly my paraphrasings, by the way) another intention.

If Davis is stuck on a particular day (which is a rarity), she assigns herself small writing tasks: each day this week, I will write a two-paragraph story. In forcing yourself to stay in the chair no matter what, the result is a brutal truth.

Look to models in published writing for solutions to writing problems.

Lydia Davis writes in order for the words to disappear. The precision of her diction and simplicity of the language directs the reader, ideally, away from the writing.

My own thought toward the end of the interview: If a woman is sitting in front of me and her cascading blonde hair falls all over my bare knees, isn’t she in my space? Should I allow this?

I may have falsely made the reader believe that my days consisted of nothing but dropping the kids at school and daycare, then arriving at the studio with the intention of working every day. The truth is that I have a job — that the studio is a luxury of sorts, and I can access the studio to work any day at any time, provided that my schedule is free of my job and familial obligations. I do not babysit our children because I am the father of these children. Any time I spend with them, no matter how monotonous it is, no matter how much it feels like a sentence, I am not the babysitter.

When you have such obligations, the days march behind one another, and unless you’re close, and your eyes haven’t crossed, vision hasn’t blurred, from lack of sleep, there’s no way to read the name tag to know what day it is.

Now, was that metaphor too drawn out? My idea was to make the days like soldiers marching for some reason, and soldiers have name tags, I think, and so I made the analogy hoping that the reader would understand the connection. Looking at the sentence now, I see that length isn’t a problem. If the metaphor is clear, the sentence length shouldn’t throw the reader off too much. I’m wondering, though, if the phrase “name tag” is a problem. Can the reader successfully make the connection between the days and soldiers without this pretentious metafictional explanation?

A few days pass in this fashion, and when my phone vibrated in my pocket, I wasn’t thinking about how many days had passed since I had given her the keys. In fact, I must have forgotten about the keys completely, as I never even recognized the number on the phone as hers.

“I need you to come down here…”

“I’m busy right now…in the middle of something. What’s wrong?”

“The keys don’t work.”

She was upset, which was a little surprising. They were keys, after all, and my thoughts could have floated toward one of two ways. They showed themselves like a multiple-choice answer in front of my eyes. Is she

a) a lunatic? or

b) severely disappointed by her inability to access the studio?

I didn’t make a choice, but instead thought about how well I must have sold her on the beauty and functionality of the studio, for her to think she could call me at work for this problem. I had been difficult for me to get many people excited about anything I had to offer.

“I went at five this morning,” she said. “I felt like an idiot.”

There was embarrassment too, apparently. I hadn’t accounted for the possible humiliation, although it sounds a little heavy-handed, of standing there for what she thought was a long time, trying to get the door open. There was also the fact that she must have planned this way ahead of time — that it became something that got her excited about her life at that particular moment. Plenty of people awaken at 5 A.M., but who arrives anywhere at 5 A.M.? This studio meant something to her.

Faces. Maybe the distinguishing characteristic of each solider and, in turn, each day, is in the physiognomy. Unless you are perceptive enough to recognize that which strays from the patterns of daily life — unless you get close enough to see the wrinkles in the faces — the days will pass by in a nondescript blur.

My wife and I have three children, so going out on dates doesn’t happen more than twice a year at the most. Last month I bought tickets for us to see a great band called Medeski, Martin, and Wood in Northampton, Massachusetts. The first time I got tickets to see them, two or so years ago, there was a bad snowstorm, so my wife and I decided not to make the trip to the venue in North Adams and, instead, have an appetizer and a beer in a local restaurant. This time, we got another bad snowstorm, which provided for a bit of irony and an excellent conversation trigger for my wife and me. I mean, what luck! Who knew what we would have talked about otherwise?

One thing we tried to talk about was why Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s set list sounded like a garage band rehearsal. Jen hated it, was nodding off at intervals during the first hour, while we inhaled the gratuitous pot smoke floating all around us, but she didn’t really understand what they were all about. MMW form their songs by playing three seemingly disparate trains of thought until they start to make sense with each other. It sometimes takes them several minutes to come together as a trio, but it’s brilliant because you get to witness the creative process as it develops from literal notetaking to something polished. Or maybe it never ends up being completely polished, but that shit’s for the recordings they do. The worst song they have is their most popular one, the one they did for Grey’s Anatomy.

They’re inspirational, because all writing should be done this way. I suspect the best ones do it, too. Teachers, professors, writing advice echoists (these people, you know them, who repeat writing advice from Bird by Bird or some other best-selling manual for people who will never really write anything, and seem to take credit for it, like they’re some kind of brilliant writing sage, god, shut up already. To write poetry, one would say, you just open a vein. God, jesus, that makes me so sick) say that you throw a bunch of crap onto the wall and see what sticks. It doesn’t really happen that way. That suggests you pause and see what slides off, when the creative process better resembles more of a participatory element. Throwing things to the wall to see what sticks seems to be a lot of posturing instead of real work. MMW were doing real work on that stage, and how much more difficult must it be to try and create something cohesive with two other people? I had a friend as a teenager, Tim Garb, who liked to collaborate with me on poetry while we sat at Package Pick-up at Sears during our night shifts. Whenever we worked together, I had to do all the heavy lifting because Tim had (has) scoliosis, had a bar inserted in his back. Later he would work as a barback at the Shark Club in Las Vegas, thus coming full circle with his identity.

Anyway, Tim and I would write the worst crap you could imagine, and it was mostly because we sucked. It was partially due, though, to the fact that it is so difficult to create something with other people. If I may be a writing advice echoist here: Writing is a solitary art.

Jen and I are going out tonight. No band, no artistic discussion. Yes beer, yes appetizers, yes talk about kids, yes in love with her.

My son is six and draws and writes every day. He’s getting better each hour, it seems, and it’s a lesson to me that a writer must write often, not necessarily every day, but often. The great Francois Camoin told me that the mind needs time to accumulate experience. So I’m thinking to write every day might be equal to dry-heaving, at intervals. Camoin (pronounced cam WAH) is the best writer you’ll never read.