Norman Green

WHAT’S YOUR HURRY?

Once upon a time I was a project engineer, and at times the places my projects took me to were not the garden spots of the world. In that profession your focus tends to be, ‘get it built, get it working, get out.’ What I remember most about those times is that every time I showed up at a new project, I walked into chaos. Nothing worked, the contractors were all worried about getting their money (or getting sued), the customer, normally a large corporation, was suffering from a serious case of buyer’s remorse, and the customer’s project engineer was usually sweating his job, if not his career. My approach was to pick out one thing that didn’t work and fix it. It didn’t make any difference what it was, even something like the machine room exhaust fans. Hey, they didn’t work yesterday, now they do. Now what’s next?

The years I spent in that environment developed in me certain traits that helped to keep me sane. I got good at tolerating chaos and insanity, at working under pressure, and my ego developed a hard shell so that I didn’t really care too much about the slings and arrows that came my way, at least until the thing got finished and began producing frozen pizzas or whatever. Toward the end of any project, my life would more or less be ruled by my punch list, which was a compendium of complaints and issues I had to resolve before the customer would sign off on the deal and I could go home. The last, say, five percent of the way, all I could think about was getting done, getting out, getting to the next one.

It’s a wonder I’m still here.

In any event, I think the project engineer’s mindset has infected my writing process, at least to a degree. The beginning of any project is chaotic and I don’t have a problem with that, out of chaos, brilliant stars are born, so says the I Ching and I believe there’s something to it. Hey, we’re just getting started, anything is possible, I’m really gonna nail this one, this one is gonna be the ish, baby…

All fine, so far.

Toward the end of the process, though, the project engineer butts in and his influence is not always constructive. Maybe my manuscript is pretty well developed, but I’ve got my punch list (my agent or editor has given me a list of complaints), and all of a sudden I’m in a big hurry to get everything knocked off so I can get on with whatever is next…

Not good. What’s your hurry, Greenie?

I am in the final phases of my current project, which I am calling ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ I already sat down with my agent and we talked over our respective impressions of the story as it was and I walked out of that meeting with a list of suggested changes.  Just fix A, B, C, and D…

My punch list. Yeah, I thought, I can knock these out in no time.

I didn’t do it, though. This time, I sat on it for a couple of weeks. That is very unusual for me, I tend to be pretty goal-oriented, c’mon, man, let’s get this DONE… Na-ah. This time I looked at the whole thing from a different place. I wanted to think about what my focus on getting to the finish line might have cost me. In my rush to tell this story, which characters got short-changed? Who needs more face time? Have I made things clear enough, have I showed you my imagination’s colors, have I left you room so your imagination can do the same?

I think one of my problems as a writer is that I am too focused on finishing. I have to admit that I spent much of my life with one eye on the exit door, and even if I don’t do that any more, I am still too ready to hit the bricks and head for whatever’s next. A book, though, is not a machine and there is no quantifiable end point. You cannot count the frozen pizzas coming out of the machine and declare it (and yourself), having hit your targets, to be done. You could actually make the argument that a book is never really finished at all, that a painting is never finished, a movie is never done, in the can, give me my check I’m leaving. I would be willing to bet that most writers, painters, directors, when viewing their past work, think most of all of what they would still change.

So how do I know when I’m done? I don’t know if I have an answer for that.

SUNDAY

NFL playoffs, Giants and Atlanta. I’ve been waiting for this game all week long, and I have mixed emotions as I sit here watching it. Aside from the dubious morality of supporting a game which measurably detracts from both the quality of life and the life expectancy of those who participate in it, I am also torn because I spent the morning working on what I hope is the last edit (it won’t be the last edit) of my current writing project, and I’m this close… Still, I have to watch. I’ve been a Giants fan since I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts, and this year Eli Manning is playing as well as any Giants QB since Scramblin’ Fran.

And here’s another thing that bothers me: why is it that Fox always manages to have an ex-Cowboy doing the color when they broadcast a Giants game? As if I needed another reason to hate Fox. And Troy Aikman? Really? Troy Aikman? There’s only two things I want to hear from Troy Aikman.

1. Shut.

2. Up.

I can’t stand it any more, I’m turning the sound off.  Pretty good game, though, Matt Ryan just tackled himself…

THE FUTURE AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

My wife bought me a Kindle. It seems I am joining the 21st century whether I want to or not. It is an amazing device, which I am sure I am one of the last people on the planet to find out. And it will pay for itself eventually, if only because I no longer have to buy Sudoku books. There’s an app for that, and it’s free. I read Mark Rippetoe’s STRONG ENOUGH? on the Kindle, liked the book, even if Rippetoe plows some of the same territory he covered in STARTING STRENGTH, which, by the way, is a great book to check out if you suffer from the sneaking suspicion that you’ve been wasting your time in the gym. (I’m healing up nicely.)

However.

I did not have to pay for STRONG ENOUGH?, I ‘borrowed’ it from Amazon’s ‘library.’ I should know the answer to this but I don’t: did Mark get a bogie behind me borrowing his book? Because I have to tell you, the idea of an Amazon ‘library’ strikes me as complete bullshit. Mark, I think I owe you a buck. I also read a rather lengthy novel which shall remain nameless here, it came highly recommended, ‘novel of the year’ and all that. It was terrible, made worse by the fact that I did not borrow it, I actually paid for the thing. Why is it that so many writers equate length with magnitude? Why do we have to be hit over the head with the seemingly endless internal dialogue of every minor character who happens to wander onstage? I plowed through it, half the time wondering when we were going to get to the point, only to discover, at the end, that I would have to read the sequel to find out what, if anything, happened.

Fat chance of that. Made me want to hurl my Kindle across the room. (There’s a sentence for you. Hurl my Kindle? Sounds like a Chaucerian pilgrim with a bad hangover.)

So now I am buying books which are no longer artifacts, they exist primarily as files on a server somewhere. Soon, if you are enough of a Luddite to want an actual book, you are going to have to send your money off to the Flat Earth Publishing Company, in the bowels of whose warehouse a big steam-powered iron beast will cough and sputter to life, print your book, spit it out and send it to you via Parcel Post, which will get it to your house one of these days.

I have a friend who is a musician of some repute. ‘You remember vanity publishing?’ he says to me. ‘Well, in the music business it’s all vanity publishing, because the music industry is basically dead. You produce your own record, you go out on tour to support it, and if you wind up selling 25 or 30 thousand copies, you’ve done all right.’

That’s where we’re headed, guys.

Who needs a record company?

Who needs a publisher?

The real drawback here, in my not particularly humble opinion, is that one of the services that record companies and book publishers used to provide was that they functioned as a filtering mechanism of sorts, because you had to rise to a certain level of mediocrity before you actually got your book or record published. So now anyone can start a band, but getting anyone except your mother to pay to hear your music is another thing entirely. How the filters will work in the future is anyone’s guess, but maybe Kirkus went under at exactly the wrong time.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I never heard of the guy until I read in the NY Daily News that someone had ripped him off  for a commencement address somewhere so I thought I’d check the guy out. The work in question is titled ‘This is Water.’ It turned out to embody much of what I love from a good writer: short, incandescent, ethereal, spiritual and perhaps most important, shorn of any inessential bullshit. The man knew what he wanted to say, and like a good boxer, he batted your defenses aside, opened you up and then he nailed you with it.

Beautiful. Perfect. Incredible.

Wow, I thought, does this guy have chops. So, I picked up a few of his longer works…

Oy…

I am not a critic. I hate criticizing other writers because I know what kind of effort goes into the writing of a book, I know what it takes. Maybe you do, too. And when a writer, (including this one) tells you that he doesn’t care what the critics say, he is full of shit. All this dithering is, I suppose, my way of apologizing to Wallace, who is not around to defend himself, for the following:

The guy was a great technician. He could take you back to your childhood, make you feel the feelings and smell the smells all over again, he had the gift for sketching a character in a paragraph or two, for showing you how the guy thought, who he was, where he lived.

And yet…

It’s hard for me to believe that Wallace ever got around to writing about the things he really cared about. I’m not saying he wasn’t good at what he was doing because clearly, the man was gifted, but never in anything else of his that I have read did he get close to the heights he scaled so beautifully in ‘This is Water.’

You can hear something similar in musicians sometimes, to me it’s like the difference between Clarence Clemmons and Branford Marsalis.  Marsalis is technically superior, there is probably no doubt of that, by any quantifiable measure you would have to say he is the better horn player, but Clemmons could tear open a note, he could smack you in the face with all of the raw emotion in a song and I never heard Marsalis do that.

One final note: David Foster Wallace pulled his own plug some time back. You hate to hear that about anyone but I hate it most of all when an artist does it, particularly when you get the feeling that he had a lot more to give. And as someone who has had to deal with more than his own share of mental illness in friends and family I can tell you for sure that sometimes depression is not existential angst, not really. Sometimes it is a biochemical malady that must be treated biochemically.

REVISIONS AND SECOND THOUGHTS

You thought you were done? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha…

My agent read the latest draft of my current writing project, which is a YA novel I’m calling ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ I am pretty happy with it as it is, or I wouldn’t have sent it to him. ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘Great characters. But…’

We have run into this snag before.

One of the things I like to do as a writer is to develop parallel story lines. Two people in a similar situation, one goes left and the other goes right, follow them both and see what happens. Or another way is to watch two characters who are looking at the same event, one seeing black and the other white. Which one is right? Is there a right at all? Is there such a thing as the relativity of truth? Don’t our perceptions create our reality? I don’t know why but there is almost always an element of this kind of thing in anything I write. I think it’s just the way I’m wired.

My agent hates it. ‘Get rid of this other story line,’ he says. ‘I like character A, but I’m not interested in character B.’

When I was first starting out I think I suffered from a slave mentality, I was so happy to have someone reading my stuff that I would have changed all my characters to aliens, given them green skin and set the whole story on the planet Zircon (which is, I think, somewhere between Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village), if that’s what he wanted.

Nowadays I’m not so sure.

I think part of the problem is that I’m becoming surer of my voice. I think I am getting a better handle on what I want to say and how I want to say it. Another part of the problem is that writing is an art and not a science, and therefore it is much more difficult to quantify what works and what doesn’t. Every statement that either I or my agent makes in this conversation has to contain the qualifier ‘in my opinion’ or something similar. Be a lot easier if you could just haul out your tape measure and determine once and for all which of you is right.

I think publishing will eventually reach a point where none of this matters, where version A and version B, and a dozen others besides, will coexist , where novels will become truly interactive and the readers (users?) will determine for themselves which story lines they will follow. This is the sort of thing going on with what we used to call video games. They’re not quite there yet, but they’re on the road and getting closer all the time.  Maybe that will be the change that finally makes the novel as we have known it obsolete.

However.

None of this helps me in my current predicament. I haven’t looked at the manuscript in question since I sent it to my agent, I wanted to stay away long enough to have some perspective (there’s that word again) when I went back to work on it. And I must admit it’s hard for me to see the forest for the trees after I’ve spent six months or a year writing something.

Another complication is objective. An agent, I am told, is primarily concerned with answering the question ‘Can I sell this?’ A writer is usually wondering ‘Does this kick ass?’ Or at least this one is.

Anyway, I have to go back to work on ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ My job is to find a way to give my agent enough of what he wants without sacrificing too much of what I want. Not so easy.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

RIP VAN WHATISNAME

I just finished the first draft of my current writing project, which I am calling ‘BENBOW STREET HUSTLE.’ At times like this I feel as though I have been reawakened after a long sleep. All of a sudden my days feel much longer than they used to and I have a lot more energy than I did. Hurricane Irene blew through and I actually had time to deal with the mess, both at work and in my basement, and now when I get home from my day job the afternoons seem unfathomably long. I am reading again, Lee Child and Jim Butcher and some others who are new to me.

Life is good.

I’m not sure I can handle it.

I am so used to having a writing project that I have forgotten how much time and energy it takes. They say gooney birds stay aloft so long that they forget exactly how to land, and although I hate to compare myself to a gooney bird, maybe that explains some of what I’m feeling. It strikes me now that much of my writing time is spent in a sort of trance, a kind of focused daydreaming where I let my imagination show me what my story looks like before I sit down to actually ‘write’ it. Scene by scene, if I don’t first construct my story visually, I won’t have anything ready when I confront the blank screen. What that means is that the process of writing, if you include the process of visualization, uses up a lot more of my resources that just the time I spend at the keyboard.

Not that I’m complaining.

As a matter of fact I’m bored already. I know I should hold off for a while before I jump into the next thing but I don’t know if I can do it. Maybe I’ll just take batting practice for a while and see what develops.

WAVES

I am on a boat, crossing the Atlantic, I am maybe 70 feet above the heaving surface of the ocean. I sit at the ship’s rail, right at the point where the hull of this iron beast achieves her maximum width. It is right here where the waves are shouldered aside, thrown back to allow passage of this ship. Each wave is unique, possessed of form and color, character and beauty and is undeniably real and itself apart but also ephemeral, existing but a moment and then melting back into that vast One, where all waves live.

DIGGING DITCHES

My first job out of high school was digging a ditch, and you know what, I’m not sure I was qualified even for that, but I was finally out of my old man’s house and I needed the money so I dug the ditch. It was a ditch inside a hole in the ground, intended to be occupied by a pipe that would drain water out of the basement of some guy’s as-yet unbuilt house. I was not new to work (I got my first job when I was twelve), but I was unprepared for the sheer amount of effort it took to hoist that pickax and drive it into the unyielding Maine hardpan over and over again. It seemed like a monumental undertaking to hack out a trench big enough to hold one lousy 4″ drainpipe. There was another guy assigned to the task with me, he wasn’t much older than I was but he fancied himself a carpenter. ‘Screw this,’ he said, or something less polite, and he quit.

Walked away.

Maybe he was just smarter than me, I don’t know.

In any event…

In every writing project I seem to hit a stretch where it feels like I am blistering my hands on that pickax again, sweating in a hole in the ground under the unrelenting Maine sun, wishing eternal hellfire on every blackfly trying to take a bite out of my ass, wondering what kind of twisted intelligence could dream up something like a blackfly anyhow. What happens, I think, is that something that started out being fun and maybe even cathartic in some sense has turned into work.

Work?

I could be watching the baseball game! I must be nuts… But the thing is, at least in my case, you don’t get to really enjoy the fun parts unless you’re willing to dig the ditch when the time comes. Also, when I do get past the difficult parts, when the ditch is finished, everything starts being fun again. It has never been writing as a whole that gets tough, just a patch, here or there.

In my current project, I think I finished the ditch a little while ago because things are going together much easier lately, for which I am truly grateful.

Next, and completely unrelated:

I love new story ideas. I get bits and fragments of this and that, they come to me at odd times of day, and sometimes they turn into something and sometimes they don’t, but they’re fun. Here’s one that came to me recently.

God did it once before.

Made it rain for forty days and forty nights.

Drowned everybody.

You didn’t have a boat, your ass was fish food.

Mr. Collins stood at his blackboard, hand raised, chalk in his fingers, eyes closed. The man is allergic to bullshit. Look, man, he says, and only a black teacher could stand in front of thirty two white suburban kids and pull off a line like that, Look, man. Leave your religion aside for one minute and think about what you’re saying. That much water, enough to cover all the continents, and it’s sitting there in the upper atmosphere, waiting for the word?

Seriously?

The cloud cover would be everywhere at once, over the entire planet, okay, absorbing heat and trapping it between the cloud layer and the planet…

Just like Venus, the kid says.

Yeah, Collins says. You think it’s an accident the atmosphere of Venus is hot enough to melt lead?

Well anyhow, the kid says, he ain’t doing it with water this time. He’s using fire instead.

Fire, Collins says.

It hasn’t rained anywhere in the whole USA, the kid says. Not a drop. Not for two and a half whole months!

Sixty-five days!

Seventy-five, Collins says. Ya dope, ya.

PERFECTIONISM

Perfectionism is a flaw, not an asset. You hear people apply the term to themselves from time to time, ‘Oh, I’m a perfectionist.’ What they are saying, really, could be more precisely as ‘I do better work than you,’ or ‘I’m an artiste, you are a schlub.’ If you are a perfectionist, you might just as well tell everyone ‘I have OCD and I never get anything FINISHED…’

I’m a perfectionist… Okay, not really, but I do, from time to time, get hung up on things that I ought to let go, and as a result I wind up wasting time and energy. I am in the middle of the first draft of my current writing project. Now, first drafts being what they are (particularly mine), a reasonable portion of what I’ve written therein will wind up either in the trash or heavily revised, so it makes no sense to sweat the details. First draft is the time to let it rip, roll with your imagination, pile up pages and leave the fine-tuning for later. I have to keep reminding myself of that, because I wind up falling into the same trap over and over again.

In my current story, my two protagonists, a couple of Little League ballplayers from The Bronx, are in the midst of a subway ride from their neighborhood to a cemetery in Queens, where they have reason to believe that a large sum of money is hidden. They are being followed by some people who believe the same thing, so they exit the train at a subway station in Manhattan and take refuge in a public men’s room. (This, by the way, is a seriously bad idea. My advice is to never visit such a place, for any reason.) Once inside said men’s room, they are accosted by a gentleman who, ahem, how shall I put this, makes his living there. When things are at their weirdest, the boys are rescued, momentarily, by one of the people who had been following them. Their rescuer is a guy who is only slightly less weird than the bathroom dude. In any event, he gets them safely out of the subway station and he begins to tell them his story. This is backstory, which is necessary, but backstory must be sprinkled in judiciously lest your reader’s eyes roll back in her head, leading her to pass out, and if she falls down and knocks her head on something unforgiving you could be sued for damages.

Anyway, this scene is good enough for now. I’ve got the bones right and I should just move on. However, I just spent a ridiculous amount of time messing with this scene. For example, there’s no way that the boy’s rescuer will tell much of his backstory in this scene. He’ll tell the boys just enough to accomplish his objectives, and not all of that will be the truth. Who and what this character really is will be shown as the story unfolds. But, this is the first draft so I’m leaving his whole spiel right where it is, that way I’ll know who the guy is, and later I can come back and clean the mess up. Seems like a simple, not to say obvious solution, and it will work. It would have worked just as well, however, two weeks ago.

THIS IS GOING TO HURT…

Have you ever noticed that most guidebooks intended for beginning writers seem to spend a lot of time preparing you for failure? I am particularly partial to an early Lawrence Block effort, ‘Writing the Novel From Plot to Print,’ yet even Block tells you how awful the submission process is going to be. ‘Multiple copies of your manuscript,’ he says, and keep them coming and going back and forth in the mail. And you are advised to treasure each rejection slip, especially the ones adorned with a hand-written line or two: ‘I did not completely despise your novel, Mr. Green, but alas, my parrot is dead so I have no current use for it…’

Humbug.

And to make things worse, things have deteriorated significantly in recent years. There might be more giant bookstores, but all of them belong to two chains, which means that the actual number of titles available has actually gone down. And every year we are told that the American public reads less. How is this possible? And how do you continue working in the face of all that?

Poets have it even worse than novelists. ‘Anyone can write a poem,’ bone-headed English teachers have been telling us that for generations. So even if you are a gifted poet, how do you raise your voice above the dreck (that almost anyone can write)? And if you are supremely talented and lucky and you do manage to get your work published in some obscure poetry journal, your recompense is likely to take the form of a number of free copies of said journal.

Hoo-effing-ray.

And yet there is something incandescent about a perfectly constructed sonnet. Check out Shakespeare’s 29th, which is truly a thing of beauty. It is perhaps my favorite poem, written over four hundred years ago and yet it still has the power to knock me on my ass every time I read it. Old Will gave them away as party favors, or so they say, but that one work of art was enough, in my mind, to render the man immortal.