Painting a Picture of Noise

Yesterday, I gave a high-level overview of some of the tools available, in the English language, for describing noise. Now comes more of a practical exercise: how to portray a noisy-crowd scene in a novel or short story (or other narrative account)? 

In the comic novella I'm writing, I have a scene that takes place in a crowded restaurant bar. (The restaurant is a fictional place called Joy Joy in Palo Alto, California.) The main character's last name is Schremp. The setup: Schremp and his office mate (Dixon) have decided to hit Joy Joy for a drink on their way home from work. But it's happy hour. The place is bustling. It's loud and getting louder. The question is how to indicate that, convincingly, in the narrative.

The obvious way is to have one character say to another: "Boy it's loud in here!" (And maybe, just to emphasize the point, have the other character cup his ear and say: "What?") Nothing wrong with that, actually, except that it has only momentary impact. It's using noise as a prop. I want the noise to be more than a prop; I want it to be an integral part of the ambiance of the scene, a kind of additional main character, if you will, palpable, always lurking, ready to intrude.

In the scene's opening line, I begin with quickly telling, rather than showing, the atmosphere:

    The crescendo of cacophony at Joy Joy hadn't yet reached full-on Happy Hour earbleed level, but the din was prodigious; so much so that Dixon had to go back out the front door to the sidewalk to check his voicemail while Schremp, securing the last empty stools at the bar, fetched two tall glasses of Buttface Amber (one of the featured microbrews-of-the-day) from the red-suspendered, all too jolly bartender-du-jour.

This is both a tell and a show. The "show" part is Dixon having to go back outside to check his voicemail because it's too loud inside. Note, incidentally, the use of a musical term ("crescendo"), which sets up additional music vocabulary later.

A bit further on, which is to say after a few lines of dialog, I explain in the narrative that the background noise has become so excessive, Schremp is having to raise his voice to be heard. So, another tell. (Maybe not the best solution.)

Schremp, at one point, scans the bar looking for signs of his new girlfriend. This is a good chance to underscore the crowded nature of the place; hinting (through visuals) at the potential for noise. 

Fast-forward past another half-page of dialog. I have Dixon asking Schremp to repeat himself ("What did you say? I can't hear you..."): Back to show rather than tell. 

At this point, I immediately break off into some exposition about the noise situation. (I don't claim this is the optimal thing to do. It's what I'm happiest with at the moment.) Here's what I finally came up with:

     Joy Joy was fast approaching the Fire Marshall's room-capacity limit (or so Schremp supposed), the place packed now with clamorous roisterers intent on pushing the decibel envelope beyond airline baggage-handler recommended maximums. Cocktail glasses (three in a waitress's hands at once) clinked and clacked, cash register slamming shut as someone's stool-leg stuttered across the floor nearby ("What can I getcha?"), burly guffaws competing with soprano laughter, a sudden swoosh of street noise as fresh celebrants burst through the main entry door, wine cork's thoppp! providing a grace-note to a distant woman's rising arpeggio of giggles—the thrum of a vox humana orchestra tuning up. 

So again, a mix of tell and show. Talk of decibel limits (these two guys are engineers, BTW) and clamorous roisterers, followed by examples of some noise-sources, with recourse to musical terminology (soprano, grace-note, arpeggio), culminating in the suggestion of an orchestra tuning up. The scene ends with Schremp and Dixon discussing the noise situation and how they would fix it with technology: barroom active noise suppression (BANS). 

How would you describe a noisy bar in a restaurant? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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How to Make a Story More Visual

Screenwriters resort to a variety of tricks to make stories more visual. I'm convinced novelists should be taking advantage of some of the same tricks, because adding visuality to a story almost always improves it, whether we're talking about a novel, a short story, a screenplay, an epic poem, or what have you.

Suppose you've been tasked with writing a scene in which a reluctant hero has to seek the counsel of a seer or swami or guru. He wants the guru to tell him whether he's ready to accept the hero's challenge.

The reluctant hero has to go visit the guru at the guru's ashram. Except, the ashram is really an inner-city apartment. The question isn't what you will have the two characters say to each other. The question is what they'll do during the scene. Will they sit on the floor crosslegged and talk? (How boring would that be?) Will one sit before a chessboard, rearranging chess pieces while the other stands and chews gum? Will they sit together and stare at a Tarot deck, a ouija board, a crystal ball?

In The Matrix, the guru (the Oracle) isn't a robed, bearded sage (Obi-Wan) but a laid-back, middle-aged black woman baking cookies! That's your first clue: Use the unexpected. Make things have a different appearance than the reader (or viewer) might have been expecting. Sometimes you need to signal (visually) a person's role through costume or stature, directly and obviously (as with Darth Vader), but sometimes it's more effective to do the reverse: dress the powerful in rags, bedeck the unimportant in bejeweled regalia.

Gandhi meets the Queen of England. Who is well dressed? Who has more power over India? Ho Chi Minh meets General Westmoreland. Who's wearing peasant attire? Who's winning the war?

In The Matrix, the Oracle bakes cookies, smokes cigarettes, reads Neo's palm. Neo mostly stands around and does nothing, although, significantly, he breaks a vase early in the scene. He also notices a sign over the doorway ("Know Thyself"). You might ask yourself why the scene was written to take advantage of chocolate chip cookies, cigarettes, palm-reading, a broken vase, and a sign over a doorway in a kitchen. Are these all "just props," or do they contain messages, meanings, special connotations? Ask yourself how you would have written the scene.

It's interesting that in a later Matrix movie, there's a similar scene, in which Neo gets to visit The Architect. It's one of the most laughably ineffective scenes in movie history. Why? The Architect just sits dispassionately in a chair and goes off on a bizarrely abstruse, esoteric soliloquy about the meaning and origin of The Matrix, while Neo looks at TV images of himself. This is an example of a "dialog" scene done poorly, done non-visually. The only "visual" is the wall of TV monitors, which instantly comes across as as sterile and gimmicky. The Architect's speech is totally forgettable. It's memorable for its ludricrousness. In this scene, instead of a picture painting a thousand words, we have a guy in a chair speaking a thousand words, saying nothing.

The scene in which The Architect drones on, semi-coherently, about the design of The Matrix is
arguably one of the most laughable non-comedy scenes in major motion picture history.

In making a scene work visually, you have a number of tools at your disposal, including setting, costumes, props, situations/actions, and the choice of words you (and your characters) use to convey the scene. Try not to think of these items as disjoint Cartesian bits. (To keep you from thinking of them in that way, I'm going to resist the temptation to break them out into bullet points for separate discussion.) Think in terms of the whole. Think "performance art."

Think "performance art" even if you're writing scenes for a novel.

When one character has to give another character bad news (or any significant piece of information), try doing it symbolically, with a visual. Is your character going to leave the country, only she hasn't told her partner yet? Maybe leave a passport on a desktop or dresser. The klutzy thing to do is have Mary tell Bob directly: "I'm going on a trip." How much better is it to have Bob spot the passport on his own and ask: "What's this?" Klutzy followup: Mary says "I'm going away. This is not working." Better: Mary says "Do we have any sunblock?" (Avoid the straight-on discussion.) Better still: "Can you hand me that plastic bag?" In the plastic bag, clearly visible, is a tube of sunblock. (Props, action, implication, possible symbolism. The sunblock implies Mary is heading for sunnier weather, both literally and metaphorically.)

Is someone getting fired at work? The obvious (and not terribly engaging) way to do it is to have the boss buzz the worker on the phone and say "Can you come in for a minute?" Then there's the office scene where the boss gives the you're-being-laid-off speech.

A far better way to handle it is: Mary comes in to her office and finds the desktop clean, sticky-notes gone, her items in a cardboard box. Someone pokes a head around a corner and says; "The boss wants to see you." Cut to: Joe the Boss, sitting at his desk alone in his quiet office, door closed. Maybe he's just getting off the phone with someone. With zero warning, an office chair comes crashing through the plate glass. Mary, eyes blazing, steps over the rubble. "You wanted to see me?"

Gesticulation is often better than a line of dialog. There's a wonderful scene in The Adjustment Bureau (see my analysis here), where Matt Damon's character (a young politician) flirts with his soon-to-be serious romantic partner (played by Emily Blunt) on a commuter bus. The two had met by chance (and snuck a quick kiss in a men's room) a few days before, never suspecting they'd ever meet up again; but now they've met randomly on a bus. The bus has stopped, she gets off, the bus's door is about to close, and Damon knows he has maybe 3 seconds to say whatever it is he's going to say. As the door starts to close, he blurts out, to the woman he hardly knows: "The morning after I lost the election I woke up thinking about you." She smiles sadly and gives him the finger.

Why is that an effective moment? She doesn't know yet if she should have feelings for the guy (even though they had a quick stolen-kiss moment); she doesn't know if he's telling the truth; and if he is, he's screwing up a sweet and precious, spontaneous, largely non-verbal moment by saying something that implies true love, before they've figured out if they even like each other. He's wrecking a beautiful thing by bringing up love! She should be happy, right? No. She's been there before. She knows you can mess up the most precious part of a budding relationship with heavy "true love" bullshit. She's giving the finger not just to the Matt Damon character but to all the stupid, heavyhanded, bullshit-drama crap that messes up so many delicate, wonderful things in this life.

Emily Blunt's single-finger salute said so many things (so many) that would've utterly failed, in straight dialog.

There's the famous T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park where, before we actually see the T-Rex, before the kids-trapped-in-the-car get to stare up at the beast in Lilliputian awe, we learn how big the creature is from a glass of water. We see concentric waves start to appear in the top of the water, in rhythm to the pounding of the creature's feet (still some distance away, off-camera). In this simple manner, we're told visually how incredibly massive the creature is, long before we actually see it.

The Log Lady.

If you have a crazy-old-lady character, you can show that's she crazy by having her say crazy things, but that's the easy way out. David Lynch did it with a log. Who can forget the Log Lady?

If you need to, just put physical obstacles in a character's way. Instead of your character walking across the room to get to another character, put a chair in between the two, and make him throw the chair out of the way so he can get to the other character.

And by the way, you're not still using plain-Jane verbs like "walk" or "look," are you? Your characters should be striding, tiptoeing, trotting, glancing, staring, glaring, etc., shouldn't they? Choice of vocabulary makes a difference. Some words conjure images and activity; some are lifeless.

One final comment. Every movie has what are called "trailer moments." What are your novel's trailer moments? Every novel should have some. Don't you think?

Figure out what your story's "trailer moments" are. And: See if you can't make some of them play well even with the sound off. If you can work irony and symbolism into the mix, too, so much the better.

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More Thoughts on Visual Storytelling

In yesterday's post, I talked about the need to make fiction more visual (something I call visuality), through the use of props, setting, situation, costume, and action.

Good fiction is vivid. It conjures imagery. The weakest thing you can do is describe a scene through narrative exposition. The second weakest thing you can do is have characters "carry" the action through dialog. Good dialog is more than just characters engaging in smart, "dramatic" conversation. A memorable scene is usually memorable because of what happens visually, not orally.

Lina Wertmüller

Some screenwriters advocate writing a silent-film version of a script first, before adding dialog. For example, before finishing a script, writer-director Lina Wertmüller cuts out every line of speech and tells the whole story with visuals. When the story is sufficiently explainable through action, she adds back only the lines of dialog that are required.

Imagine what this allows you to do. When you've got a good visual story, dialog can go to the next level; you can afford to devote spoken lines to subtext, things that aren't being said, the way things are said, plus foreshadowing, back-references, innuendo, irony—you have so many things to do now, with dialog, besides carry the story.

You can try a thought experiment right now. Think of some of your favorite movies (and maybe some of your least-favorite). Which ones would still be tremendously entertaining to watch with the sound off?

Consider the first of the Star Wars movies—a visual feast from start to finish. We know, even with the sound off, that Darth Vader is the villain. The first time we see him, he's all-black, he's giving orders (and others are carrying them out), and the fact that he's a foot taller than everyone else tells us (visually) that all the Imperial soldiers around him are quite literally underlings. (Plus he of course strangles a coworker early on, which tells us this is one seriously bad dude.) The first time we see Princess Leia, we can see (with the sound off) she's being held under duress. The barroom shootout works even without subtitles. The first time we meet "Ben," he's robed, has a beard—it's pretty obvious he's a wise old man with special knowledge. The entire movie works in silent mode.

The later movies in the Star Wars series (later, as in release date) are dialog-topheavy movies that don't work nearly as well in silent mode as the original film.

The first film in the Alien series would make a very decent silent movie. The later Alien films, not so much.

Jim Carrey has been in a ton of movies. Which ones do you remember most? That's right: the ones that are highly visual. The wordplay in Dumb and Dumber is first-rate, but guess what? The movie is still funny with the sound turned off.

I'm not saying the only good movie is one that can be enjoyed with the sound off. Obviously, movies benefit from having sound. I'm saying most stories can be made better by doing the storytelling in a highly visual way.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give practical tips for boosting the visuality of your novel or screenplay. It turns out there are many ways to pry the lid off this particular can of worms.

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Visuality: How to Make Fiction More Visual

I'm firmly convinced that a solid understanding of the craft of screenwriting can only improve your fiction-writing skills. Many of the skills of good screenwriting, if transferred to novel or short story writing, make for a much-higher-impact story. I'm talking not only about story structure and dialog-related tricks, but verticality and "visuality"—making a story more vivid by making it more visual.

Visuality is something good screnwriters spend a lot of time trying to achieve. Mediocre scripts, and even some "good" scripts (of the "I like it but don't love it" variety), are often mediocre simply because they lack visual impact, relying too much on explicative dialog to move the story along. When you read one of these scripts, you get the feeling you're reading a stage play.

But even stage plays (good ones, that is) rely heavily on visuals, rather than just dialog.

Kenny Hodges in 1977.

Many years ago when I was working for The Mother Earth News, I came to be good friends with somebody at work named Kenny Hodges. Kenny was a great raconteur (I can't begin to replicate his skill here), and one of the many amazing stories he told was the story of the time he auditioned for, and landed, a part in a Broadway play.

The way he tells it, Kenny and some friends decided, on a lark, to get in line for an open reading for a play. Kenny had never done any acting. He had been a musician (the bassist in the 1960s group Spanky and Our Gang). Many people were reading for the part. The role was that of a small-town hoodlum of some kind; the reading involved dialog between the hoodlum and the county sheriff.

The dialog was fairly humdrum, the hoodlum saying to the Sheriff something like "Oh yeah? Well, you may think you're the big shot here, but you ain't got nothing, hear me? I'm the one in charge of this town. Not you."

People read for the part, one by one, and got told "Thank you" by the director (meaning: you're dismissed, have a nice day now).

I couldn't wait for Kenny to reveal the secret of how he got the part, so I interrupted him while he was telling the story and just asked him. He explained that when he got on stage to read the lines, he improvised. At the critical moment, he held out a fist, thumb pointing straight up, and said (completely off book): "See that?"

The actor playing the Sheriff stepped a little closer, looked at Kenny's thumb, and said something like "What? What's that?" Whereupon Kenny flexed his thumb and pointed to the crotch of the thumb, under the first joint, and said: "That's where you are. Right there. Right there, my friend." In essence saying "I've got you under my thumb, asshole."

It got him the part. The director had the thumb gesture written into the script. (Unfortunately, due to a musical engagement, Kenny—who never seriously thought he would get the part in the play—had to decline the role, and never got to act on Broadway.)

This is an example of the power of visuality—and the kind of thing you should be having characters do, if you're writing a script or a novel.

I'm going to continue on this theme in tomorrow's post, because there's a lot more to say about visuality and how to use it to enrich fiction.

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The 2100-Word Paragraph

And so, having just spent 850 words (see previous post) discussing the need for, or at least the usefulness of, verticality in writing (most particularly, screenwriting), I thought I might trot out an example of horizontality: writing that forces the reader to parse word by word by word (never paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza) through an extended piece of descriptive text.

The follow 2,107-word paragraph (which you can also find here) occurs in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book that won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction (and would have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year, except for a passage that was deemed coprophilic). Widely considered a postmodern classic, Pynchon's idiosyncratic tribute to wartime paranoia has found a place on more than one list of 100 all-time greatest novels.

The setup: Two characters, Roger and Jessica, have come upon a church in the countryside outside Kent, England on a Sunday evening. World War II is in its final year. During a hymn, Jessica lapses into a dreamlike fugue state. 

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead ends . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible touch, which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline sea son here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances—stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it's not "Giovinezza" but something probably from Rigoletto or La Boheme—indeed the Post Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songfulness, this lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evacuees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst the other goes playing "dead"—cioé, conditionally alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well, most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but there's no mano morto for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh—no play, for God's sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about, a kind of windfall, why there'll be time to adjust certainly to that . . . But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year's toys and found reincarnated Spam tins, they're hep this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable side to the Christmas game. In the months between—country springs and summers—they played with real Spam tins—tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow and blue about the dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of their exile. Now it's time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk. The grandparents, who've waited each week for the Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack? will wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue—this is the hillside, the sky can show us a light—like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and shawled vigils, theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation every year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season. . . . All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for holding the houses' identities against the winter. The War needs coal. They have taken the next-to-last steps, attended the Radio Doctor's certifications of what they knew in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky, cheap old-people's swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring's run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It's a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the center-lines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe-smoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the unheated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in the court of the King. Eia—strange thousand-year sigh—eia, warn wir da! were we but there . . . The tired men and their black bellwether reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps' clothing as the year will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going . . . Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . . and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot Roosevelt, padre," come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: "Wendell Willkie!" "How about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined . . .

It's hard to know what a modern-day literary agent (or one of their interns) would make of such a passage, so "wordy" by modern standards, so unapologetically given to the use of acronyms, obscure references, bits of Italian. (Note: Unless you're Italian, you probably didn't spot the rare Pynchon slip-up: He said cioé —immediately before "conditionally alive"—when he meant cioè, which in Italian means "that is to say," akin to the Latin neologism videlicet, usually shortened to viz.) And the book itself: so steadfastly storyless, interspersed with obtuse bits of half-dialog and soliloquy, characters wandering lazily in and out of flashbacks and reality, no discernible plot per se (other than the implied one of WWII itself), much less any "reversals," twists, or last-minute reveals . . . 300,000 words of meandering—and mostly horizontal—prose.

In any case. Not all verticality is good; not all horizontality is bad. Prose can and should go in whichever direction(s) it needs to go. Only, have a regard for the reader. If the road is bumpy, be sure the reader is strapped in tight. Make it impossible for him or her to be left behind. 

Then let it rip.

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Verticality

In studying screenwriting, I'm struck time and again by how many tricks of good screenwriting can be carried over to traditional fiction writing (stories, novels, novellas), often to the great benefit of the latter.

A common complaint about bad screenplays is that they're a lot of work to read, because the author spends too much time in flowery descriptive narrative. You can tell when you're reading one of these scripts: It takes you two minutes—instead of 30 or 40 seconds—to get through a page. (Once you've read some really fine scripts, and felt their rhythm, you can sense the snail-like rhythm of a "stinker" script instantly.)

Page 2 of the Alien script (shooting version).

In the screenwriting world, we say that bogged-down scripts often lack verticality. (Charles Deemer gives an excellent summary in his post on "Making Scripts Vertical.") The idea comes down to this: Your eye spends an awful lot of time, in a slow-moving piece of writing, simply going from left to right (LTR), parsing word by word through one sentence after another after another. (Obviously I'm talking about English and other alphabetic/LTR languages.) This is what one might call horizontality; it's the basis of all alphabetic-LTR writing, because letters and words occur sequentially. But every once in a while, your eye gets to drop down vertically on the page—when there's a new paragraph, a subhead, a section break, a new chapter heading, an inserted block quote, a bulleted list, etc. Anything that makes your eye drop down is verticality.

Your brain keeps track of the ratio of verticality to horizontality. It begins to ache after a while if there's not enough verticality.

Horizontality is tiring. Why? Because it's linear, and that's not how cognition works. Processing linear text requires a highly specialized area of the brain. Perception (involving the senses of the body in conjunction with the whole brain) results from experiences taken in episodically, not always in a particular order, as a collage of disjoint bits that may include memories, ideas, emotions, smells, sounds, what have you.

Many of the great art movements of the early twentieth century can be understood in the context of an escape from the shackles of linearity. A photo, like a reaistic painting, maps one area of light or dark (in the photo) to a similar area in the subject; in fact the verb "map" implies linearity of just this sort. Impressionism attempts to break from linearity so as to allow the brain to do what it does best: assemble meaning from disjoint bits. Likewise, a common stylistic trope of postmodern fiction is the telling of a tale as a pastiche of disconnected and not always time-ordered pieces. This sort of storytelling (think The English Patient) engages the brain in a different way than straight narrative, often to stunning effect, since nonlinear processing centers of the brain are enlisted in the attempt to render the overall meaning.

If you have any doubt as to how hard (cognitively speaking) linear, horizontal writing is for the brain, try reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On the Road (available in the 50th anniversary edition from Viking/Penguin), the version that reflects Kerouac's original rendering of the story as a single long paragraph. Somewhere around ten pages into the 300-page-long paragraph, you'll be wishing for an indent, a section break, or some other "break" from linearity. The single-long-paragraph device takes getting used to.

Screenplays are intrinsically highly verticalized. They're broken up into short pieces that vary a great deal in terms of indents and margins. Thus they tend to be much easier to read quickly than a novel. But (as I said earlier) even among screenplays, there are those that read easily and those that feel like work.

Take, for example, the following bit of narrative, adapted from Alien:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert, each wearing gloves, boots, and jackets, enter the air lock. All three are carrying laser pistols. As Kane touches a button, a servo begins to whine and the inner door quietly slides shut; then the trio pull on their helmets.

That's not how the scene appears in the final version of the script (written by Walter Hill and David Giler, based on an earlier screenplay by Dan O'Bannon). Here's how the script was written:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the lock.
All wear gloves, boots, jackets.
Carry laser pistols.
Kane touches a button.
Servo-whine.
Then the inner door slides quietly shut.
The trio pull on their helmets.

Telegraphic; staccato; almost poem-like. The "before" version is what you'd read in a novel (or a not-so-great screenplay). The second version, from the Hill-Giler script, is experiential, sensory in its telling. Two entirely different ways of handling the same content; two ways for the brain to process the information.

In your novel (you know, that one you've been working on all month?), before you get too tied up in Proustian 900-word sentences and Pynchonesque paragraphs that ramble on for pages, have a regard for the cognitive load imposed by linearity. Consider introducing a little more verticality.

Lighten the load.

Your reader will thank you.

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The New Weird

Last night I was looking at The New Weird, a collection of fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and after reading a couple of stories (and some essays in the book) on the New Weird, a variety of thoughts came to me about the state of fiction today (not that anyone can claim to know the "state of fiction today," of course, but that's partly the point). I should mention that my thoughts were also, in part, moved along by a Huffpost review I happened to read last night—by U. Wisc. Green Bay Professor Harvey J. Kaye—of Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. Professor Kaye, who follows me on Twitter, pointed me to the review. It's an excellent review, although I respectfully disagree with many assumptions in it; and because the review was so excellent, I won't be reading Joffe's book now that I know how absurdly outmoded its assumptions are. (More of which, in a minute.)

What all this got me to thinking about is: Where is fiction headed? Where is it now? Where should new writers of fiction consider going?

My first route to prying the lid off these questions was to try to get to the core of New Weird. Which is an adventure in itself.

What is New Weird? Why does it exist? What audience-need does it serve? This turns out to be a difficult set of questions. There is no New Weird Manifesto, no elevator pitch that reduces it to a neat logline, but the VanderMeers say it's "a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy." In terms of signature works, China Tom Miéville's Perdido Street Station is oft-cited as prototypically New Weird, along with works by M. John Harrison and even Clive Barker.

In terms of common elements, New Weird seems to involve, more often than not, an alternate reality or alternate society (optionally on an alternate planet) with new rules of behavior (optionally magical, but more often than not simply cultural and/or state-imposed), with characters that may or may not have special abilities or powers, special body modifications (a la Clive Barker), special quests. Elaborate world-building is thus a mainstay, a la Tolkien. In terms of basic storytelling, all the usual Joseph Campbell tropes (hero's quest, etc.) apply, along with common-sense storytelling best practices.

As I survey the New Weird landscape, I don't see a whole lot new, honestly, so much as a tedious (if admirably elaborate) reskinning of the Old Weird, going back to Poe and Lovecraft, with heavy debts, also, to Aldous Huxley, Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Orwell, Ellison, Dick, and others. The cultural reorganization of society along NewWeirdian lines that one sees in things like Perdido Street Station (or Miéville's story Jack, in The New Weird) feels, on some level, instantly stale to me. But that only makes me more anxious to understand why it feels fresh to others.

The New Weird is clearly an attempt to break out of the thematic tropes of mid-twentieth-century fiction, but it already feels stillborn in its quest to take Tolkien in more phantasmagoric directions, precisely because of its slavish insistence on making characters behave in accordance with elaborate (and supposedly fresh) systems of rules (cultural or state-imposed; less frequently self-imposed) in their "new worlds." The early and mid-twentieth century fascination with the apparatus of bureacracy (Kafka, Orwell, Heller, Pynchon) seems to trudge on, in different clothing and in deeper mud, in The New Weird. In terms of success in breaking away from conventional thematic tropes and techniques, it strikes me that bizarro fiction—with its frequent recourse to absurdism, surrealism, and proto-Dada grotesquerie—comes much closer to missing the dart board (where missing the dartboard is, in fact, the aim).

Earlier I mentioned Professor Kaye and his incisive review, "Whither America," which speaks to the themes of grotesque nationalism (my term, not his) explored in Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. The out-of-date sociological metrics by which Joffe analyzes America's "Policeman of the World" and "Default Culture" (my term) status evoke in me the same frustration (and, at times, abhorrence) I feel with NewWeirdian fiction vis-à-vis its slavish dependence on externally supplied (and sometimes quite archaic and baroque) sociological rule-systems. Apparently the Policeman of the World meme (brutally and dangerously archaic as it is) still resonates with certain nonfiction audiences the way Kafka still resonates with fiction audiences, the latter being (from my point of view) far more comprehensible. But in both domains (fiction and soiological nonfiction), readers still harbor the hangover of nationalism, heard in the ever-reverberating echoes of Orwell; and I think it serves modern audiences—and the common literary weal—ill to continue to pay homage to the dead bronze statues that so gravenly mark our progress in literature.

The story of the last thousand years in human history is largely the story of nationalism—the aggregation of peoples and ideologies under "state" banners with messy borders crudely drawn in blood. It's thus in no way surprising that the vagaries of militarism—and (in peacetime) the apparatus of control—have so preoccupied the literary mind over this timeframe, with some of the most famous signposts in all of western literature having names like War and Peace and Gravity's Rainbow (the latter denoting the parabolic arc of the V-2 missile in WWII). To be sure, fiction has also during this time produced significant tonnage of highly personal and psychological works, novels having more to do with issues of character and interpersonal dynamics; and such works will always be relevant, because they cut quickly to the bare-naked core of human existence, stripped of its geopolitical underwear, as it were. But the question is why we cling so lovingly to the cold stiff corpse of State and/or External Authority as the controlling factor in characters' everyday worlds; more particularly, why do we seek refuge in archaic-feeling representations (no matter how lovingly and elaborately permutated) of externally validated rule systems? (Externalism of this kind arguably reached its apotheosis in The Matrix.) How many flavors of Tolkien or Frank Herbert (or Kafka or Orwell) do we need, going forward?

Systems of Control are still relevant, but not (IMHO) as represented in the "world-building" narratives of NewWeirdism or OldWeirdism. The current world is, in fact, much weirder than any of that already. The Systems of Control of today are not explicit manifestations of state nor ideology. They are far more subtle (and dangerous), obtaining legitimacy directly from the suppressed and exploited (that's you, that's me) through their passive assent. No law, no explicit form of coercion, makes you eat at McDonalds (or order, with your Happy Meal, more soda than the human stomach can reasonably process). And yet America the Superpower, America as Default Nation, along with most constitutional democracies in the world (most countries templated on American politics), is happy to allow its citizenry to be obese, diabetic, sclerotic, and cancer-prone. No law explicitly requires you to buy Chinese goods at Walmart (or for that matter to take a minimum-wage job at Walmart). And yet your host nation has you wearing cheap foreign-made clothing, and using foreign-made electronics, while the underlying jobs (not just grunt-labor jobs but "good" jobs in technology) are shipped out of the country. No law requires you to go hungry in the greatest food-exporting nation on earth, yet one in six Americans requires Food Stamps.

To see more clearly the desolate bus stop on history's joyride that we've come to, it might help to roll back the tape and put your mind inside the head of a Thomas Paine, say, or a Rousseau or Voltaire. Suppose, in 1770, as Paine, you were to read a "speculative fiction" novel (supposing such a thing existed at the time) about a future nation-state, the Greatest Country on Earth, in which printing presses have largely disappeared (recall that as late as 1975, printing was the most prolific business type in America), "pamphleteering" has become obsolete, and citizens consume the majority of their reading matter by means of magical devices coupled to the Great Interconnector. Further suppose that although literacy has become universal, citizens of this strange future country spend a good time watching "visual replicas of plays" (films, videos) instead of reading, and the majority of citizens who choose to spend any time writing (hundreds of millions worldwide) are reduced to filing dispatches of only a few hundred characters at a time (Twitter and Facebook updates). Now imagine that in this strange future-world, people live to be 80 instead of 50, and yet a third of the citizenry is sick with obesity-related illnesses (not just diabetes but heart disease and cancer). Fully a quarter of the population takes daily pills for "high blood pressure," diabetes, or melancholia. People are required by Tithe Laws to give a tenth of their income to the state, which spends a good deal of the money on foreign wars devoted to dubious goals (goals that would not have been compehensible in Paine's day). Meanwhile, average citizens incur crushing debt to obtain an education, then are not hired for their knowledge or skills; they obtain degrees in "political science" or philosophy or literature, but go to work for inconcceivably large corporations, doing incredibly menial things; many of the jobs paying an unconscionably low "minimum wage" that has one in six persons dependent on public munificence for food.

These sorts of "future-world" facts would have seemed absurd to anyone of Paine's generation. What would have seemed most preposterous of all to Paine, in particular, is the notion that huge masses of people would not be marching on their governments in revolt!

Paine would have considered deeply troubling the geopolitical yardsticks by which a Josef Joffe measures a nation's stature: military budget, GNP, hegemonic domination of world politics, etc. He would have identified strongly with measures of infant mortality, wellness, general happiness, opportunity (he would have loathed the term "upward mobility," however), poverty rates, hunger, incarceration rate—all areas where America consistently ranks poorly.

To the extent that writers of fiction are envisioners of the future, or at least envisioners of alternate worlds, it seems to me we fail our readers if we tether our worldview to the soggy mire of militarism or nationalism (in any of its guises). Given that the social milieu is an Unseen Main Character in novels that build new worlds, it would seem appropriate to take stock of current Control Structures and build worlds that resonate with the issues that pertain to the modern inhabitants of those structures, many of whom have been brainwashed that slavery is freedom (or vice versa), ignorance is strength, war is peace, etc. By the old measures, America is still the greatest country on earth. By any rational measure it's arguably the most broken country on earth. By buying into old notions we break fiction itself and render it a self-parody. Society is evolving. Nationalism as a concept is fading. The Control Structure conventions of yesteryear are like a once-magnificent cake that's been sitting all day in the rain. Why must we continue to eat from it?

It's not enough for fiction to permutate and pervert the past and serve it up again in shocking colors. Serve us up something new. If weirdness is a necessary ingredient, just look around.

As a reader of fiction, I want to move beyond Tolkien-in-a-party-dress. I want the next New Weird to come without a rearview mirror. The current New Weird isn't doing it for me.

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The World's Longest (and Best) Paragraph

In May 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his friend Neal Cassady to tell him about the road-trip novel he'd just finished. In the letter, Kerouac talked of how he had typed the entire manuscript between April 2 and April 22, on a single 120-foot roll of teletype paper, single-spaced, "just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road."

Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On the Road.

Six years later, an edited, vastly shortened version of the manuscript (with the characters' real names changed to fictional ones) was published by Viking Penguin ("in mutilated form," Allen Ginsburg once said). In 2007, to mark the book's 50th anniversary, Viking Penguin published the original single-paragraph "scroll version" of On the Road, complete with creative spellings (and containing the sex scenes that had earlier been deemed too controversial), with original character names intact and no attempt to "correct" anything other than the most obvious typos. (The original scroll is today owned by sports magnate Jim Irsay, who paid $2.43 million for it in 2001.)

The 2007 scroll version is the edition I just finished reading, and it's the only edition of On the Road anyone should ever read, because the single-long-paragraph nature of the book and the use of real names for real people are crucial elements of the work, in my opinion.

Like Jack himself (both in the story and in the writing of the manuscript), I got off to a bad start with the book, reading the first 40 pages in one sitting, then making the mistake of letting it go cold for several days. In a book with no plot that's told completely experientially, that's printed as a single 300-page paragraph with no breaks, you have no structural reference points to hold onto, whether typographically or in the story line, which means that if you walk away from it, you forget where you were almost instantly. In my case, I found myself starting again at page one after the first false attempt. And I made damn sure to keep moving from that point on, stopping only to eat, bathe, attend to bodily needs, etc. before resuming the trip.

I got through the book with difficulty. Kerouac's language is suitably mellifluous and inventive, his reportage sincere and seemingly accurate. But the nonstop parade of nonsensical events, leavened by the tragicomic personal-life misadventures of the womanizing Neal Cassady, is ultimately tiresome. Happily, after 135 pages or so, the travelers arrive at the Burroughs ranch in Algiers, Louisiana, and the writing style pivots ever so slightly as Kerouac launches into a loving, carefully crafted portrait of the enigmatic Bill Burroughs. From there, it's back to a meandering series of road trips to New York and San Francisco (always by way of Denver), with various side trips thrown in.

The Great Depression had long since ended, of course (this was 1949), but you couldn't tell it from the indigence of the characters. Jack's monthly $18 checks from the Veterans' Administration seldom went far, what with Neal Cassady's constant need for booze, cigarettes, gasoline, weed, and bail money. What they couldn't afford to buy, they often stole. (In Cassady's case, that sometimes included cars.)

At one point in the story, Kerouac inexplicably comes into a sizable (for those days) sum of cash: $1,000. It's never explained that this was, in fact, the advance for Kerouac's first novel, The Town and The City. He uses it to move his mother from Long Island to Denver. The woman finds Denver not to her liking and moves back to New York. Money gone, Jack hits the road again.

The story accelerates and acquires an almost Hunter Thompson-like feel in Book Three (the "book" breakpoints are unceremoniously noted inline in the text, without indents or spacing) when Cassady and Kerouac agree to deliver a two-year-old Cadillac limousine from Denver to Chicago. They put over 1,000 miles on the car in 23 hours, breaking the speedometer cable after exceeding 110 mph. Along the way, they suffer various mishaps and end up turning the car over to the owner in ramshackle condition. Miraculously, the owner never sends the police after them.

Arguably the best storytelling comes in Book Four, when Cassady and Kerouac, having exhausted America's highway system, head to Mexico. The writing is vivid, piquant, engaging, endearing—unforgettable.

Of course, there is never any hint of a plot, dramatic structure, etc., and that's exactly the point of the book (and of life); the journey is itself the point. It's also why On the Road couldn't possibly find a major publisher (as it did in 1957) if it were written today. It doesn't check the checkboxes of agents' and publishers' "minimum requirements" for a novel. In fact, it quite deliberately gives the finger to all such requirements. Which is why On the Road stands virtually alone among bestselling novels of the past 70 years as being truly experimental yet also truly a quintessential piece of Americana and American literature. It would be fun to submit the book, in manuscript form (as a single paragraph) under a pseudonym, to agents and publishers, just to collect the rejection slips generated by the legions of interns and editorial assistants and self-appointed arbiters of the literary status quo who would never dare take a chance on anything as proto-gonzo as a plotless, one-paragraph, 125,000-word road diary centered around an itinerant womanizer/con-man and his urbane college-dropout buddy. Noo noo nooo, we shan't have any of this.

Today, Kerouac (if he were starting anew) would have to put out his own print-on-demand and e-book editions of his work and then go about the grim business of gaming the Amazon rating system, maintaining a blog (and Facebook page and Twitter account), and doing all the other must-do activities of writers who want to rise above the background noise of what today passes for literature, all without a hope of ever getting a review in The New York Times (much less the kind of review On the Road got from Gilbert Millstein in 1957).

We should all be glad that Kerouac and On the Road came along when they did, at a time when a quiet, humdrum, thoroughly racist, excruciatingly conformist America needed the kind of wake-up call Kerouac provided, and the kind a New York City publishing establishment was still able to give. Those days are over, of course. We're on a different kind of road now.

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