Slag

At least once a week I’m asked to read someone’s work. Few know I’m a writer. I must have a big ol’ target on my back that says, “Hit me! I’ve got time to read your slag.”

It gets worse: “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars to review my eighty-thousand-word novel.” I’ve learned to reply with an ego-boost but a safe out: “Send me the first ten pages and I’ll let you keep your money if I don’t want more.” I don’t want more, usually. My lunch break isn’t long enough, anyway.

So I’ve avoided collecting a pile of manuscripts for the most part but a few hardy souls persist: They leave’em on my doorstep. Sometimes, I confuse the manuscripts with the latest phone book delivery that I ignore until the next spring cleanup, or until the corners curl and I realize the yellow pages were not original, maybe from the sun or worse, dog pee.

I’m an SOB, for sure. I’m on the back nine of life so I don’t have time to look for balls in the weeds. I open up the slag to the middle and look at the page, observing how the lines recline on the page, how the paragraphs box up the words, whether the damn thing breathes to the eye. If I don’t see at least three paragraphs on the page, I toss it shut and head inside. Sometimes I give’em the benefit of the doubt and thumb a couple of more pages. If I see an entire page solid with words, I leave the mess on the porch.

If the page “looks” OK, I start with the second paragraph I find there, hoping for no more than four sentences. What does the first line claim? “Morgan started the car and drove off.” Sorry, no. “Morgan drove off.” Period. We know he had to start the car to drive off. Too many words telling me unimportant stuff.

The recycle bin is in the garage. Eight steps, nine if you count dodging the dogs happy to see me at the front door. If you left a stack at the front door, you best have me before the laundry room door. That’s six steps, seven if you count sidestepping the one dog that’s always camped out there for extra num-nums. I toss him and the recycle bin treats. Good doggy; bad writing. Hand me another ball.

A Writer's License - Part I

Dad was a sport. An engineer who had no patience for artistic pursuits. That was Mom. Dead now a dozen years, her Smith-Corona battened down in the dusty sea of carpet under her desk. Back in their bedroom down the hall, far away from mine.

He drove me downtown and stopped in front of the building. “Need any money?” He leaned forward on the steering wheel, arms poised to take another stroke, ready to row his two-plus-two-equals-four boat straight and true and right out of this foreign, loose-with-the-facts neighborhood, its commas pole-dancing a dozen or so along the granite curbs, trailing a little too much leg, Bourgeois caps on road signs paraded lower case behind them like peasants ignorant of the boiling fervor for a blogged-out revolution, choosing not to raise Helvetica in these Times of New Romans, the perfect spelling would make that dark queen, Mr. Felder, my sissy sixth grade English teacher, squeal happy brandishing his red-pen claw for another brief moment. And they were… oh, so brief, like recess on the first warm spring day.

“Nah, I have fifty bucks.”

“Here, take this.” He handed me an envelope, limp over his finger mimicking a skinny, dead fish. “It’s not much, but it’ll tide you over.”

“Thanks.” I took it quickly but didn’t want to look at him, afraid he’d see that I, too, knew this might be a long ordeal. “I’ll probably be out by lunch, first time and all.” I tried to be chipper. I lied. Isn’t good writing telling good lies? I might never be out.

“Go on. You’ll be late.” His eyes drifted across the street again and up at the tired, three-story building, a few bricks from being condemned as unfit for fairness. “Look. If you don't pass..."

It’d be a tough sentence to finish. I did all right in math, thanks to his hours of after-dinner tutoring, devouring enough quadratic equations to lose an appetite anyone would have for my mother’s delightfully dialectic desserts topped with a good helping of humor and sprinkled with whimsy. Despite corralling my mind inside complex equations, my heart leapt the prickly fence lines of fouled up math to graze on scribbled green poetry in the wide-open margins of my calculus textbook. My math work was healthier at the time. That was before I learned from the typing teacher, Mrs. Synder, to finger-fuck a keyboard, its keys squirming under a constant orgy of creative thought, before I started marching those black fleas fearlessly across innocent skins of virginal cellulous, latched on to some wild-hair idea born of spit and sparkle, before I went days without a bath to better up a story and worsen affairs of the heart and flesh through unrepentant neglect and philandering with such lovely phrases all a flame in their leopard-print syllables and low-cut constructs, sipping languid vowels, seducing my mind’s heart with coos of consonants. Before I was up to the challenge and could come away with the illusive treasure of the finest woman in any room, Writing’s home phone number.

I had yet to call up the courage to collect a license. And that was up to the verbal voyeurs up in that building, far away from the quick and kind smiles of friends and family, but now just across the street hidden from me like some lecherous ghouls of grammar and good story lurking in the shadows of the greats that came before.

“I’ll put on supper.” Dad smiled faintly and glanced again at the building.

“See ya soon.” I hesitated. He was still eyeing the dirty windows and broken pediment. Just below its pathetic concrete crown, a few chiseled letters protruded from a grimy limestone plaque: Bureau of Artistic Pursuits – Writers Licensing Division.

I grabbed my stack of dog-eared manuscripts, snatched my shoebox from the floorboard and shoved open the car door. The west end of the block already darkened with rain, everything cocooned in a shimmering skin of dreary, thick dampness, generous with gloom. Trees drooped, people slogged, spirits burdened, bubbles burst. Even mischief took its leave, sense of humor long gone.

To the east, perky publishers with pocketed rays of sunshine bosoming against the sleazy silk of sincerity freshened the cavern of brownstone hovels of hokey homogenized literature for the bovine masses as if God himself was the shoeshine of this sacrilegious creation. Shop signs advertised the hopeful: “Holister, McBrikles and Ivory: A manuscript today, a million $$$ tomorrow.” I felt even assholes were welcome, but only if they were great, heroic and wholesome. I wouldn’t qualify. Tom Clancy preached, Nora Roberts led the street-corner choir and hack writers, their cheap suit seams bursting with shat-out sequels, passed the hat soliciting for the short hours left of lives wasted in the hogwash of horrifically ordinary writing. I felt breakfast slithering up my throat. I had to look away.

On the street in front of me, a tall kid skateboarded by with a fist full of sputtering pens and a beat up paperback swaying three inches from his pimpled nose, a saddle-rest for his four-foot thick glasses permitting him to peer into a world gilded by the gifted. The mailman, too, had his curved hook in a rare book, dozens more jostling in his delivery bag, vying with one another for the next caress of human hand and critical eye. On the stoop behind me, kids sat on soured-soft basketballs, lunchboxes littered on the sides with Salinger and Whitman quotations, and like a song for my amused eye, an upside-down pink plastic trashcan with fairies afloat seemly falling a flitter for their final resting place in Hades (as it fucking should be). The kids played Scrabble with swords of scholarly self-righteousness, so sharp Webster sat up and took note for his next edition, arguing whether words could be nounified for points. [Of course, they can, but only if exemplified so elegantly in sweet sentences that make angels swoon and howling dogs go silent.] Preschoolers with sticks chased wind-blown, week-old newspapers down the sidewalk and once snagging a piece, and although they couldn’t yet read, raced one another their tracing fingers to find the longest word on the page. Mothers, each with an eye in her own book full of luscious language, their free eye on their children, called for them to come back, practicing their adverbs: “Edgar Allen, get your lil’ black behind back here most expeditiously.”

Across the street eased against the curb, a few limousines languished in their sullen fumes, their chauffeurs huddled together eyeing me hopefully and yet with faint distain. Agents inside, no doubt, ready to command a new willing slave, sipping the Champaign of another’s success: “Bow down and lick the drivel of dead hope off my Italian shoe made from Andalusian leather.” [That’s in Spain, you self-sanctified asshole.] Whores, I’ve heard, who know every trick in the sadist’s book but their pens can’t make magic and produce a rabbit of originality.

I overheard the old men on the bench next to me reminisce about their favorite sentences. One pulled out a lump of leather from his pocket and with trembling hand, shared a yellowed clip with the other. “Frank, you know I can’t see nothin’ no more. Let me just touch it.”

I was in the right place. Exactly the right place. All too familiar with my painful happiness, I smiled. Dad drove off, orphaning me at the curb.

“Psst, hey! Over here.” A voice in a tailored dark suit and long topcoat.

“What?” I hadn’t taken a step since I left the car, drinking in and now drunk from the sights around me.

“Wanna get a license real quick? Got plenty. Look like the real thing. You can say you’re published. Just pay me five G’s ‘n’ you’re good to go?”

“Really? It’s that easy?”

“Yep, don’t have to waste all the postage, no gnashing of teeth over the query letters, no lengthy editing process. Quick, easy, done. Whatda say?”

“I don’t have that much money.”

“Well, kid… how much do you have?”

“Fifty dollars… and bus fare.”

“Get out of here! Scram! Why are you wasting my time?”

“Sorry, you approached me. I’m interested in the real thing, actually. A writer’s license.”

“You’re no writer, kid. You gotta pass that damn test first. Good luck, sucker.” The man turned, his overcoat flaring from his legs and disappeared in an alley.

I headed across the street, sure of step but working hard to catch up with my feet.

On the stoop at the entrance, sat a young girl in a flowery cotton dress and wearing a woolen cap on a warm summer’s day. “I tell fortunes,” she said frankly. “But you don’t want one, do you? That’s only slightly different from not having one.” She shuffled the cards, stirring a breeze laced with gardenia.

“Not looking for one, either.”

“Not many like you come this way. Most want a fortune…and fame. They pay dearly. I’ll do the one you don’t want for free.”

“I’ll pass… sorry to disappoint.”

“Makes no difference to me. Fate ‘ll treat you just the same. Thought I’d just save you some trouble.” She tossed the cards into her purse and sat down. “Go see the old man just inside the door.” She thumbed over her shoulder and looked up. “No matter what’s ahead, don’t look back or you’re out. The SOB’s watch every pen stroke. They don’t care what you write. They care whether you mean it.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen… and six hundred. Funny, Will Shakespeare asked the same question straight outta the box, too. I still have a crush on him.”

“So do I, girlfriend.” I patted her on her thin arm and took a few steps up the stairs to the door.

“Wait.” She shot up and danced the stairs towards me. She motioned for me to stoop down to her face. She kissed my cheek, her soft lips bruising against my stubble.

“For luck,” she said, squeezing my elbow. “It’s the only friend you got now.” Her blue eyes bloomed violets and larkspur. “What’s your name?” she sung.

“Why?”

“Why not?” Her fickle best friend, Chance, called with a thin voice from somewhere down the street.

“Fair enough. Doubt you’ll hear it again. Jack, Jack McCoy.”

“I’ll remember you, Jack McCoy.” She winked and skipped off. “Chance, Chance. Let’s go down to the gas station ‘n’ get someone to spend a buck and buy a million dollar lotto ticket.”

Guess that’s the most a writer can hope for. To be remembered. A million bucks is left to some goon who goofed off a buck on the lotto and made me wait another few minutes behind him in line to drop a twenty on gas while he scratched off his bad luck exposing the prize most pray for and few deserve. Go figure. Dad, drop the quadratic equations. Logic left the building.

Inside, an elderly gentleman in a crumpled, dusty tuxedo hunched over stood the best he could in a foyer the size of a tight elevator. “Been here before?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, suppose you read up on the process ‘n’ all.”

“Yea, brought everything with me.” I lifted the stack of manuscripts slightly and nodded to the shoebox.

“Yes, sir. I see that. Won’t be needin’ that paper much. It’s what comes after that counts.”

“I’m proud of most of this.”

“Won’t be after this experience. Wanna leave those with me? Might be a bit easier for you.”

“I guess.” I handed him the foot-tall stack and felt instantly lighter.

“Up those stairs, son.” He pointed up to the wooden stairs, oak threads sculpted from wear, exposing rusty nail heads yet unforgiving of their grip. Tall white plaster walls, muddied by the damp, dirty hands of the hopeful narrowed the stairs.

He dropped my stack on top of a four-foot high column of others in the corner. I pointed to the brightly colored lavender sheaves buried halfway down the pile.

“Yeah, ‘bout the only thin’ pretty ‘bout her work. She’s still up there. If you wouldn’t mind, don’t mention I said anythin’.”

“The secret’s safe.”

“No, it ain’t. She put it out on the Internet. Probably sorry she did by now. She’s getting’ a good grillin’ up there is my guess.”

“Hear you met Will Shakespeare.”

“Yep, got his photo and autograph in a frame up there on the wall just past Chaucer’s.”

“And Hemmingway?”

“Yea, him, too. Gave me a Cuban cigar, he did.”

“Meet my mother? She got an apprentice’s license back in ‘59 but didn’t go for the full deal.”

“She’s waitin’ at the top, son.”

“My mother!”

He motioned for me to climb the stairs.

I saw a figure at the top. Up I went. I glanced at the photos along the way, skipping a step at a time, cranking my muscles past all those cocksuckers we h studied and wrote laboriously dull papers on. I kept focused on the figure at the top. When I got there, heaving air, a gray typewriter case stood alone, its chrome latch gleaming in the dull light. A note card propped against it: “Good luck and God speed. Love, Mom.”


“Did you see a short woman standing here.” I pointed. “Round, infectious laugh,” I asked the woman behind what looked like a receptionist’s desk.

“No, sir. Lots of folks see something like her there. You here for a license?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Above her desk, a sign in Roman letters: “INSPIRATION. You can go see the other stations, but you best stop here first.”

“Mind if I spend the day here?” I pointed to the sign.

“Some do…and never move on. That’s why those boys down there at EXPERIENCE get to take long lunches.” She frowned. “Wish I could take a long lunch. If I did, this whole place would come to a grinding halt.”

“I might have something for you.” I flipped open the shoebox and fished for the clump of wax paper tied with thin bow.

“Here.” I handed her the package

“What is it?”

“Homemade fudge. Mine. With coconut, nutmeg, walnuts, and raisins.”

Her eyes lit up. She took a bite. Her tongue traced her lower lip, collaring a few crumbs convicted at last to time on her pallet lonely for a delectable treat. On her desk, from a page of her open dictionary, a writer’s most useful creative tool, under “death by pleasure”, shone her likeness.

“You trying to bribe a government official?” she cooed.

“No, ma’am. Sometimes fate, longing and pleasure get on the same elevator to top floor of heaven. They wind up huggin’ one another like old friends, only they just met.”

“I see you met my daughter.”

“Who?”

“LUCKY. Downstairs, with the cards.”

“Oh, yeah. Cute girl. I can see where she gets her looks.”

“Certainly not from her daddy.”

“Who’d that be?”

“HASTE. Lazy bastard. Had the looks of Zeus. As if hurry makes it good. She’d be better off without his genes.”

“How’s that?”

“Folk think luck just happens, snap their fingers and here it is. Most don’t know it’s made, much like with this here fudge. Put the right ingredients together, especially the elbow grease, and wah la!” She handed me an index card. “Sign here.”

I did as she said…as always and whenever she called.

She pulled out an inkpad, dabbed her rubber stamp and pounded a pair of big red lips on the card.

“Here. Take it to the next desk. And thanks for the fudge. I never get the credit.”

I nodded. “You know that’s not true. You know it won’t be true of me.”

She blushed. “You can go to any of those desks.” She pointed out into the mammoth open room. “Those at SKILL are SOB’s. They don’t like show offs, rule-breakers. Just get it done, watch the commas, verb tense, point of view, rookie stuff. EXPERIENCE got all day for a good story but keep it short and skip over the details. It’ll drive them crazy enough, wanting more, to get you passed on. STORYTELLING, if you make it that far, you’re off the map and on your own.”

“Why you telling me all this?”

“You won’t be back here again, whether you pass or not.” She seemed sure, like she knew a fortuneteller.

“Nah, guess not.” She was right. No reason, really. It’d just be…over.

“You’re outta nutmeg, aren’t you?”

I smiled. You can’t get me here. Not this early. And not with INSPIRATION. I could have this girl nearly anytime I want. “Yep. But cinnamon works, too.”

“See, I told you. You won’t be back,” she pouted.

She was right. I loved (and lost and loved) her type. A fish with a well-oiled bicycle. A two-pound Mountain trout with a robins egg blue Schwinn bike, a white wicker basket out front stuffed with freshly picked artichokes and raspberries. Yea, I know. Inspiration’s like that. Artichokes and raspberries don’t grow together in the same region.

“Keep an eye on this typewriter, won’t you?”

“Sure thing, honey. Be an honor, your moms ‘n’ all. Good luck and thanks for the fudge.”

“Most welcome. Think I’ll try my hand over at EXPERIENCE, first. I feel… lucky.”

(continued)

Critiquing Critiquing

Three months after I started attending the writers critique group, I noticed my stock of Scotch needed a more frequent re-supply than usual. Perhaps it was my leisurely routine. I sat alone after my day job with a tall pile of manuscripts on my lap and a short glass in my hand. The sun streaming in through the porch windows warmed my face on those cool winter’s afternoons as the cinnamon-colored liquid warmed my soul. Burrowing down deeper in my favorite chair, I tip my third glass before the sun sinks like a rock, and I summon enough fortitude to flip open the first piece.

Rarely more than halfway through the first story, my eyes float away to watch the dogs race about the lawn in a game of chase, their beards parted and plastered back against their cheeks in the wind, or the acrobatic family of squirrels swinging from wisps of tree branches like trapeze to the bird feeder beyond the pool or the western sky turn amber then blush red behind the swaying trees slowly waving, beckoning dusk to blanket the scene. I switch on the reading lamp and reach for a collection of my own writing under the side table.

No doubt all writers take pleasure in reading their own work. On these particular nights, I like to read my own work for a bit because the stories befriend me afresh. Although I know how they end, how they go, I always appreciate the trip, seeing something different each time and, naturally… making an edit or two. I’m happy to see my old friends, even on the twentieth visit in as many days. They remind me of what I try to do when I write, how I do it, and in turn, why I often struggle with the works of others.

Writing has to be the most difficult simple process in the world. Make up a story and tell it well. That’s it. That’s all that’s required. Don’t need a degree; in fact, in over thirty years of marching smart lines of fleas over paper skins, I never heard of a school that teaches the simple magic. Yeah, believe it or not, there’s a bit of magic. Maybe that’s the rub.

That’s not to say schooling’s a waste of time. I sat through some fairly heavy-duty classes in college, the kind you need the instructor’s permission to join, graduate level shit where everyone’s out to be the next Hemmingway, and the instructor’s some published asshole who thinks he is Hemmingway. I wasn’t skeptical about writing then. I wrote my little heart out, being overly clever, reaching for metaphors and analogies that God wished He had created. In retrospect it felt like I was writing elegant computer code for some hollow, useless program. No matter how elegant it was, it wasn’t great writing. Hell, it was barely acceptable writing. It wasn’t beautiful. It had no soul. I aced those classes, the easiest writing I ever did.

Later there were the private, expensive and ‘respected’ liberal arts colleges that sponsored weeklong or weekend writing seminars with another passel of published assholes. The male instructors would fawn and fall all over the divorced women in their thirties or forties who wrote depressing pieces, no doubt autobiographical, stories so full of angst about beings reduced to being barely human. In Boulder, Asheville, San Antonio, Telluride, and Boston, they were nearly all the same. Snow made the difference between most locales and experiences. I appreciated its silent purity… and its numbing effect.

I pick up the second story, a chapter from a novel about talking dragons and little people, as if the world we live in isn’t strange enough. I follow along looking for ‘it’, that little something that makes the effort worth the time. Could be a poetic phrase, could be a twist in the plot, could be an economy of words that says it all. I find nothing of this sort. And this is after nearly 12,000 words and over what seems like as many weeks.

Would-be novelists seem to think words are cheap, that they can wander all over the place, dropping in characters and meaningless detail because they can and it costs little to nothing, a bit like Hansel and Grettle dribbling behind bread crumbs, hoping they can find their way back to something publishable while the birdbrain readers gobble up every last word. After all, novelists have a book to fill. Bullshit.

I’m convinced we waste so many words because there’s no law that says we must limit a novel to 25,000 words. If there was, most novels would improve… greatly. Entered a writing contest once (yeah, vain fool that I am) and had to edit out 200 words to get the piece in under 2500 words. Took me a week to find and fire those words but in the end, the piece was a helluva lot better.

For an inexperienced writer, having your story critiqued by 15 other struggling writers can be a little intimidating. Perhaps that’s why only a handful regularly submitted work to this scrutiny. As a newly hired garden editor, my first published piece for Southern Living magazine was about the Peace Lily plant (Spathyphyllum) and carried less than 500 words. It took me six weeks to ‘get it right’. Six weeks! It would come back from the copy desk bludgeoned and bleeding with red ink. Surely, they killed a couple of red pens in the process. After that, you could drop an A-bomb on my work or me, and like the Terminator, I’d emerge from the fire, more determined than ever to write a killer piece. For others, missing out on the exercise of receiving such scalding criticism, a few hot and heavy words might be too much.

I remember my second night attending the group. The writing was atrocious, for the most part, and known by others outside the group as being ‘forthright’, I let ’er fly: “This sucks,” I started off. “Sloppy this, poor that, hideous here, down right awful there.”

I sounded like my high school orchestra teacher, only with a bit more testosterone, a week before the annual Christmas concert. I knew she didn’t think we totally sucked, just mostly. The clarinets, a bevy of blonds, were usually late to practice and seemed tardy, too, with their cues on their notes. The strings were a bunch of squeaky bitches that thought straight A’s in other subjects made them first-rate musicians automatically. And the brass section… we were always too loud.

Weeks earlier in her ’65 Mustang convertible with a bad heater, the mini-skirted Ms. Snyder took me on a frigid Saturday, on her own time, to a shop thirty miles away in Philly to custom fit my trumpet’s mouth piece to my slight overbite. Lil’ ol’ me, one of her sixty-plus students, the kid with a face full of zits and wicked lips.

A few days before the concert, as first chair trumpet with a little pull in the group, I shot up mid-way through another sorry after-school practice, in front of the frustrated Ms. Snyder (if only I had been ten years older), and screamed at the sleepy flock: “Wake the fuck up!”

While the waiting parents froze outside in their cars, we stayed late and polished off the last few dozen rough spots. I expected a detention. I got an immediate chastisement and moments later, when no one else was looking, a wink. When I close my eyes for the final time, I hope I see that wink, hoping it leaves me with the same small smile.

So I figured a little honesty and a bit of a heavy handedness would get the lazy author’s attention. And once I had it, I could sweep in and offer a few suggestions to clean up the mess.

Not so.

Apparently, as a seasoned member so elegantly told me, I had to do it ‘nice-nice’. Hmmmm. The next time I had the opportunity to review this author’s work, I changed my approach: “Colin, you know I love you, but this sucks...”

I know nothing about writing. Really, it’s true. I just jot down what I see. I’m not talking about the color of the fairy’s wings or the sounds of rocks talking. I see how a character puts the whitest mushrooms on his partner’s salad plate, how she studies the spot where he keeps his car keys and consider whether hers, as a houseguest and would-be lover, would crowd the spot. In the action, I see the motivation and expose the nature of the character:

“A shopping list?”

You were standing at the door, hands on your hips. A few wisps of hair hung over your left eye, the ones you ignore when you’re focused on a single thought, whether it’s dragging out the trashcan, sizing up a putt or deciphering your cell phone bill.

Good writing is good observation. Maybe that’s why more than one high school first date tolerated our visits to the Philadelphia airport on those Friday nights. We’d sit there sipping Cokes and make up stories about the world passing in front of us: what the tears and smiles meant, how he held her hand, where he looked when he said ‘good bye’, how she walked off. No one thought of me as a romantic then. After 30-plus years, it’s still what comes just before the kiss that counts.

One picture may be worth a thousand words but make sure you choose the right picture. An avid cinema fan from the first, from the fantastic Sorcerer’s Apprentice through to the modest masterpiece of masterful story telling in The Shaw Shank Redemption, I owe any skill I claim as a writer to good movies. They taught me how to write. If I were teaching writing today, I’d show only movies then have the students pick them apart for hours. What was the director looking at? Why did he choose that scene, frame that shot, that angle, focus on that dialog? Why?

A contrite heart, resigned to a love lost. On the verge of tears, she stood there, not a singer, but emotionally naked, as if confessing in front of her former lover, now the mike, her hand gently caressing its neck, made all the more sincere by the bitter-sweet, shop-worn melody of her lone, sad voice. She took a deep breath and muscled into the chorus with a quiet fury. (from I Can’t Make You Love Me- jrt)

Ninety minutes later, if that filmmaker was successful, he may have told the entire story of someone’s lifetime by capturing only minutes, maybe mere seconds, snippets of that lifetime on film. The chosen few; the beautiful few.

Showing. Showing selectively. Yep, that’s what it’s about. Wake the fuck up!

What peeves me most are dull characters. This life is too full of uninteresting people to have me read about them. Again, I hear those assholes: “But it’s not real. Life is boring.” Yeah, well… next! Give me the gourmet that likes grape jelly on his pecan waffles, some reserved, well-dressed woman that prefers to swim in the nude, and the killer that befriends his knife, taking it with him everywhere, even the bathtub.

I’m probably one of the few that goes out of his way to seek out strange people. I’m not talking about the borderline mentally competent or the generally weird. I mean the ones that have a rational, studied reason for the odd things they do. The girlfriend that buys me flowers and shoe polish the day after Valentines because they were both on sale. And that gourmet that chooses grape jelly on his waffles? It’s an antioxidant and has 30% less calories than maple syrup. Of course, makes perfect sense. OK, I’ll buy that but there he is, standing in front of all that shiny Cuisine Art and a commercial-grade gas stove. Then I pick up the cookbook on the counter, already open to some deal with asparagus and chocolate (What the…? Better have a double boiler.), and a fresh condom package falls out of the rear index. See what I mean? Can you see it? Can you hear the questions the scene stirs in the mind? It just gets better from there. Simple magic. And these bunnies don’t shit in your top hat.

Then there’s superfluous dialog. Like putting quotation marks around something makes it golden: “My ass!” Dialog should show you something about the character, not serve as a full-time substitute for the story line, more like the conversation I had with my neighbor last week who was furiously pulling the cord repeatedly to his reticent string trimmer and quickly exhausting his arm as well as his patience:

“Bitch!” I heard him mutter from across the street.

“Frank, back off the choke halfway,” I yelled, shielding my eyes from the merciless mid-day sun.

He ripped on the cord another three times. Nothing.

“BITCH!” A lot louder this time.

“Make sure the switch is ‘ON’”, I shouted through my cupped hand.

He glanced at the handle and slammed the switch forward. He tugged the cord again and the thing coughed and sputtered to life.

He looked up. “Fuck you, Tate!”

“Have a nice day, Frank.” I smiled, waved and drove off.

It might be useful to know he’s Italian, shaped like a fifty-five gallon oil drum with stubby power poles for arms and legs and sports enough gold chain to rival the collection at Fort Knox. Maybe, but I don’t think so. The dialog conveys the thrust of the story. I chose to let the reader fill in the blanks about height, weight and ethnicity, those details that add nothing more to my main focus, the relationship of the characters.

I like telling dialog that’s up front and in your face with plenty of prose in between. It’s also easy to think something’s important when the dialog is sparse.

From what I pick up and glance at these days, most authors (and/or their editors) take readers for sticks in the mud, incapable of thinking or feeling or drawing their own conclusions from those fleas authors march across those thin skins. Yeah, I hear those published assholes already. “You should make it easy for the reader. He should be able to follow along, not trip on anything…

Yeah, that’s why I’m nodding off by the forth page. I’ve got nothin’ invested. You told me everything. Made it real easy… to fall asleep.

The third story is familiar, a classic battle of good and evil. It’s a character-driven piece that seems to go no where but tell me a whole lot about some folks the author invented and placed somewhere in time. It’s like decorating rooms of a story that I would never visit by choice, babbling on about the bobbles of superfluous stuff hung here and there that does nothing to progress the story or my interest in it. Oh, I’d like to learn something about a ’75 Ferrari 308 but right here, right in the middle of a murder mystery? Is it symbolic? Did the killer use its speed to escape the cops? Pretty sexy syncromesh tranny, huh? Could any other vehicle been substituted? Let’s not chrome a pig. And for the rare few women (remember, women will mostly likely be our readers) who are sports car buffs, was that really enough detail for them to say, “Gee, this guy really knows his 308’s”?

I’m sure by now you will question why I rarely missed a bi-monthly meeting at some point in this story, but being a vigilant Virgo, I kept up my attendance. Granted, when I first mentioned I would be joining a writer’s group, the woman was proud I had found an honorable pursuit outside our relationship. I think she just wanted the remote for herself those evenings.

Good writing at its best is like flirting. Tease the reader along with sexy language and imagery. Good criticism is very much the same thing. In the process of dishing out the dirt, a little sly humor goes a long way. After all most have poured their hearts and souls into their works. Takes a deft hand to massage the ugly truth into something that doesn’t leave a mark.

As we circle the room, each speaking his or her thoughts about the piece we are reviewing, there’s a palpable silence when it comes to my turn. If you listen ‘real good’, as Warner’s cowboy character would say, you can hear the hammers lock back on those big bore Colts of criticism I have in my hands. The author knows what’s coming.

Sometimes I warm both barrels [You can use that, Warner or Colin.] This is reserved for the folks that need a ‘good killin’ as Robin would say. I know they have real promise. My job is to head them off to writers’ paradise sooner so we don’t have to endure any more of their slow-poke shit. Get it right, I say, or die good an’ dead.

Other times I slip one of the hammers back against the cap, nice and easy like
(Warner), and make a few small suggestions that lets the author live another day. A few too many passives, a wandering story line, a weakly defined character. No one should lose his or her life on these points. I just wing’em… mostly.

Criticism is way more difficult than writing, and I fail almost always. First, there’s simply not enough time. Secondly, we tend to focus on what’s off the mark rather than suggest how to bring it back on course. It’s tough to emulate another’s style and motivations without rewriting the passages in question. When that stuff came back to me at Southern Living from the copy desk, they had re-written it. Sometimes I argued with it. Mostly it was better, a lot better. They showed me how to make it better.

Perhaps the real reason I continued going to the critic group is that it kept me writing. If I read something that missed the mark, I couldn’t help but write something as a response, not a criticism as such, but a story that tested whether I had the right to comment on the skill I criticized. The group has been a hot bed of inspiration.

“A black Ford pulled in front the squad’s barracks at the appointed time. Private Johnson slid into the back seat. The car drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the vets posting at the Vietnam War Memorial, past the hundreds, may be thousands of sunburned tourists gathered around the Washington Monument, to the east gate of 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. Drifts of spent cherry blossoms washed across the drive in the breeze and freckled the fresh green grass beyond the curbs. Johnson sat up with wide eyes.”

So I stepped back a bit from the literature, none of that ‘two story’ shit I did earlier, but I did sneak in a sweet zinger to see if anyone is awake and ready to complain. I used only one line to absolve the main character of ‘doing right’, his path “washed” symbolically with the historical reference to the blood of Christ (cherry blossoms), his youth referred to via the verbalization of “freckle”.

Tough to take a swing at me for being boring and it’s harder still to call me conceited when you know I’m usually right. I began early writing poetry in the margins of my calculus textbook and differential equations on the sheet backs of my orchestra scores. I turned in my final project for college freshman English as a photo essay with few words. I knew I would get an ‘A’ in the class even if the professor failed the last piece. I had already done the math.

All the dishing aside, I still cherish the near genius. Like much in life, sometimes you have to pry open a lot of oysters to find a pearl, and, yes, every now and then in the group, I’m treated to something extraordinary. One of the best writers in the group claims English as her second language. She’s fooled me so far. Maybe that’s what makes the work so remarkable, an elegant economy of words, pointed and spot on. She writes in short sentences, plucking the pith of observations from the most ordinary scenes that color the canvas of my imagination so quickly, sparingly and vividly that I’m instantly drawn in by the prose of the first few lines. The stories are as innocent as they are haunting. The culture she writes about and her language use are like a foreign flower, a fragrance familiar but a form so strange, the essence of magic.

I dare not disturb this writing with my clumsy comments. The fragrance and this flower are meant not for a tawdry vase of criticism but should be left to breeze and garden of pleasure from whence they came.

And that brings me to the most flaming criticism and my greatest sin of heresy. Let’s say I spent half a year hammering out a decent novel, agonizing over each little this or that. I think the reader owes me something. He needs to work for my stories, bring a bit of his/her imagination to the table, pose a few questions, start to put two and two together, actually do the math, think, think deeply.

If I started in reading a piece with parallel stories, I would sit up a bit and square my shoulders. [Was that ‘nice-nice’ enough?] The author obviously didn’t fall off the story telling truck just yesterday. How do the stories integrate? Why he’s doing with this? Just to make me do mental calisthenics?

In the short piece “Pass”, I spent two hours writing the story and two weeks wrestling with the last 34 words. It comes down to this: “Luke launched a flamer and James swung under it as it neared the earth, rescuing it safely from its half moon arc as the first star of the night poked through the red sky.”

That’s the slick skinny. Here’s the long of it: Luke, the son of the killed medi-evac chopper pilot in the first story, launched (potential reference to the heavens) a ‘flamer’ [ball] (as did his father in Viet Nam, tying back earlier in the story) and James swung under it (the name of the biblical physician apostle, the healer) rescuing it safely from its half moon arc (moon representing the maternal—sons of the same mother, “boys now men”) as it nears the earth (an allegorical reference to mortality, the act of rescuing/saving a soul, anything earthly is not heavenly) as the first star (an age-old metaphor referring to the souls of the dead being numbered by the stars in the heavens) poked through the red sky (a simple link to beginning of the story and ‘red sky at night, sailor’s delight’, the delight of that single-star soul the who is likely observing the scene from above or, at very least, is memorialized by the moment similar to one twenty or so years earlier).

Whoa! You’re kidding us, right? [Don’t try me.]

‘Fraid, not, folks. Ratta-ta-tat tight, if you ask me… on levels beyond mere sentence structure and story telling. Why didn’t I just say Luke tossed the ball and James caught it? End of story. Because this is where I’m trying to cross the deep river of words from the banks of technically good writing to the far shores of literature. The magic is no longer ‘tricky’. It’s grace. It’s beautiful. Magic is no longer some clown that pulls cute, wonderfully rabbit-furry phrases out of a clean, white page, no longer common fleas marching across the skins of paper.

Writing at this level is a “sacred privilege”, much like Thoreau said about fishing.

“Paul fished for trout since he was old enough to know not to piss in his own pants. He knew his favorite spots like the breeze knows where to blow. He had never seen a Black Trout but had heard the stories. He wasn’t superstitious in the least. In fact, he hoped he’d come across such a fish just to retire the legend of its mystery. On the river to Damascus, Paul was about to be made a believer.“

I remember when I wrote those lines in one rush. When I hit the period on the last line, I said out loud “Fuck me”. My girlfriend heard me from the kitchen: “Guess it won’t be this me this evening.” I ignored her. Like a gambler on a roll, I paused only to catch my breath and dove in again. The chapter entitled Black Trout has supplanted my ten-year all time favorite No. 4. from Diary of a Couple, a still unfinished manuscript:

“Come,” you said. You led me to the bath and unzipped the back of my dress.

“Take as long as you wish.” You took something from the cabinet and left.

The hot shower traded some of the pain for fatigue until I could only think of bed. I dropped on the cool sheets face down. Sleep was only seconds away.

Perhaps it was a dream. I never asked. There would be other nights similar, opportunities to quietly find the truth about this one. I preferred the mystery to the fact.

I heard you come in and switch off the light. Then your hands, firm and full, closed over my hips and traveled confidently into the pain. Like a Saturday afternoon stroll through an uncrowded gallery, your fingers and thumbs, now coated lightly with oil, lingered here and there, everywhere the pain was beautiful. It wasn’t a massage, although every screaming muscle was silenced. It wasn’t sexual; there was no trace of expectations.

Sleep that night was like sinking ever more deeply in a bottomless sea with no fear of drowning. I hoped death would be like this: darker, deeper, freely letting go of things I had no idea I was holding on to.

Written over ten years ago, I sat quietly, humbly, thankfully. Then started in again.

Surely, someone will count up the passives I used.