Remembering

Remembering

Today is Memorial Day. Our friends across the pond celebrate the day on a different date and call it Remembrance Day. The idea for both is the same; we honor the memories of those who have lost their lives for their country.

I say lost and not given as some might say, because I don’t think that most of those who we honor would have freely given up their lives if they had a choice. None of the men who lost their lives in Viet Nam chose to stand up and say as they do in the movies, “Today is a good day to die.” Instead they did what they had to do, and in the process they were killed.

Were they brave? Unbelievably so. Did they risk their own lives for others? Many did, and then lost their lives doing just that. Should we honor them? Without a doubt.

Should we honor the men and women who sent them there? No. Were the intensions of those who chose to send our armed forces there well meant? I hope so, or for those who believe in an afterlife they will live in torture for all time.

There is a passage in the last of J.K. Rowling’s books that I think is appropriate for us to think about today. The hero has just been killed by the villain, and is talking it over with his mentor. [Side Note: Yes, I know this sounds impossible but it is after all fiction that is loaded with magic, so you’ll just have to live with it,] His mentor says “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living” I think Rowling had it right.

All of the men and women who died were free of the fear of dying and the dread that infects your daily life when you think that death may come at any moment. Those who live beyond them and only have their memories are the ones to whom we should hold out pity and sympathy. If you doubt this you should have been watching the national Memorial Day celebration on the national mall last night. An actress, Selma Blair, portrayed a young widow of a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. Her words spoke to who it was that suffers the most from the death of the fallen. Her loss, and the loss of her children, of that brave man who will no longer be there to share their lives, said where the pain lives after the death of one “of the brave.”

My family did not have to endure that sorrow, as did the families of many of the men I knew who were killed during that conflict. To them, and to all of the families of those who have died in the service of our country, I say remember the good, forget the bad, and live the best you can.

Character Descriptions

Character Description

Almost every story I’ve ever read has contained some sort of character description. Sometimes in a story only the protagonist is described. Other authors provide rich descriptions of all the characters who come to the pages of their writing. I find in looking back over several things that I’ve written that I’m not consistent in the use of physical descriptions of characters.

There are some stories where I barely mention the gender of the characters. In others, I seem to feel that the reader needs to know the most minute elements of the character. It doesn’t seem to matter just how long the story is. Some short stories have descriptions so exact that you could pick the character out of a police line-up. In other cases, full books have characters who are almost invisible, even though they have a major part to play in the story.

I recently was given a copy of a very short story, only 538 words, where the author used about fifty of those words to describe one of the three characters in the story. That’s almost ten percent of the story dedicated to telling you what one of the characters looked like. Was the physical description of the character truly important? Certainly the description of the eyes, was critical to understanding the story, but was the rest of the description that important? Certainly Bob J. thought it was, and he was probably right.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for the works of J.K. Rowling. Alright, I suppose you could say that I’m obsessed with her story of the “boy wizard.” She uses a deft pen to describe her characters that still allows the reader to see each of them in their own mind. I must admit that I appreciate that style of writing. It lets me paint a picture of the character that I can keep throughout the story, or in her case stories. I truly hate it when I see a motion picture that is made from a book, and then read the book afterward. I’m stuck with the picture of the actors in my mind and can’t use the author’s words to visualize the characters. This turns out to be a real pain when the actors and the descriptions of the characters differ widely.

I will admit that in looking back through some of the stories I’ve written, I now think that perhaps I could have been a little more generous with the descriptions. It’s not that I was running short of words, I mean I have a whole dictionary full of them. Not that I’ve used all of them. Think about it, just how often can you describe a person as “quixotic?” Even if you’ve read “Cervantes” it’s hard to imagine someone as quixotic.

Although, it’s a great word to remember if you’re playing “Scrabble.” Not that I play Scrabble all that often. I like to use words but I’m afraid that spelling them has never been my forte. Without that trusty dictionary, and the spell check program on my computer I’d be lost, and writing would take twice as long as it does now, since I would have to spend as much time looking up the correct spelling of words as I would need to place them in a story.

I find it interesting, or perhaps ironic, that in the most published book ever written, the protagonist is never described. That character has been drawn or painted more than any other. You can go throughout Europe and it’s is almost impossible not to find one rendition or another depicting the protagonist somewhere in every town. And yet, in the book there is no mention of what the protagonist looks like. The protagonist is quoted extensively, and there are lengthy descriptions of what the protagonist did, but no words are used to describe the protagonist. As Arte Johnson might have said on “Laugh In,” Very Interesting.

Writing about Writing

I’ve talked about what we write about and why we write, but I’ve skated around actually writing. However, since I said in the opening that I would write about writing, it’s only right that I write about writing, right now.

I don’t know how others write. I’ve heard some of them talk about doing gobs of research before they start to write. I’ve also heard that some writers get blocked from writing and can’t go on without some sort of mantra, or time out at a spa with mud treatment. That’s not the way I work. For me it’s more like taking dictation from the characters, on how the story should go. They even call me out when I deviate from the original story they’ve told me.

I don’t think I’m nuts, but once I start to write a story it’s a downhill race to finish the tale. Let me tell you how it goes for me and the stories I write. Well at least most of them. I will admit that sometimes I write about something that actually happened in the real world. Not often though.

On with the telling of the tale. For me it’s like going into a giant airplane hangar. You know, one of those old Quonset huts that you see in all of the World War II movies. When I go in the hangar is empty. I can see where I came in and where at the other end I can go out. Basically that’s the story the first time I see it. There’s the beginning and the end. (Side Note #1: I know that some of you are asking why a Quonset hut? Why not a tunnel, like all the rest of those allegorical writers. Well for me tunnels always seem dark and damp, and who wants a soggy story. Why not a house then? Well houses have too many things in them that are a part of the house and not a part of the story. That means that I would have to sift through everything I see, to find out if it’s a part of the house or part of the story. Basically I’m too lazy to make that kind of effort.)

As I get used to the lighting in the place and look around, I start to see more and more detail. Usually the first things that I can make out are the characters. Not all of them right away, just the main players, and where they will be in the hangar, or the story. As I look around at the door I just came through I find out how the story will start. That’s when I’ll start to write the story.

Sometimes I’ll look all the way down the hangar and see the faint traces of the entire story and I’ll write it down so that I can remember it once the main typing starts. (Side Note #2: In case you haven’t guessed by now, I type everything on a computer. First of all my handwriting is atrocious. I know this for a fact since Sister Mary You’ll-Never-Amount-to-Much told me so in sixth grade. She said “Your handwriting is atrocious and no one will ever know what you’re trying to say. ((Internal Side Note #1: They didn’t let the nuns have machines or other sharp objects in those days, so she had never heard of a typewriter. If she had she would have told me that my spelling was also wanting.)) So that means you’ll fail at everything you try to do.” Lucky for me she didn’t have the gift of fore-sight. Second of all I really spell badly, and without the computer’s “Spell-check” I’d be doomed.) Meanwhile back to the telling of the telling.

At other times I just start to look around at the opening very carefully and type what I see. When I finish a story, I rarely have to change much of what I wrote in those first days. Somehow the beginning I saw, always remains the correct beginning for the story. In those cases, I’ll just go a little further into the hangar each time I get back to the story and write down what comes next in the same amount of detail as the beginning. I know that the story is finished when I see that I’m at the far end of the hangar.

As I go along, one character or another will tell me that someone new is needed to complete the scene. Every so often I will close out a scene and one of the characters will jump up and say, “Hey you forgot to leave the knife in the bushes outside of the library window.” Then I’ll have to go back and add the knife to the description of the murder scene. (Side Note #3: I really don’t write murder mysteries, although people do die in my stories. See my earlier discussion on why I think that immortality might be boring.)

If I read what I’ve written and it seems a little pale or thin, I just look back on that part of the hangar and with a little more focus I can see the details that are needed to make the tale more complete. It’s all there for me to see as long as I’m looking in the right places at the right time in the story.

So that’s the truth. I haven’t the creativity to make up what I write. I’m just good at taking dictation from the characters in my stories. (Side Note #4: Please don’t tell any of the characters in my stories that I’ve told you this. It’s not that they’d disagree, it’s just that they don’t want to be held accountable for the bad writing.)

Immortality

Immortality

The definitions of immortality are either immunity from death, or living forever. The first might make for a pretty boring life, as many of the things we do are spiced with danger, and if you couldn’t die that would eliminate an awful lot of what we find dangerous. I’m going to set aside the possibility of being maimed or paralyzed for the rest of eternity.

It is the second definition that has caught my attention today.  Now perhaps the idea of living forever might be appealing to some, but as I’ve aged and my body has found more and more ways of failing to perform according to the original specifications I’m pretty sure that living forever could be a very painful way to watch the world go by.

Rather, I was thinking about the way that things have changed in the last hundred or so years. You are reading this through an electronic medium. (Unless you’re standing behind me reading this over my shoulder.) Throughout history (Side Note #1: For this piece to make any sense what-so-ever we have to be talking about written history.) we have communicated through speech, writing, or pictures.  This has resulted in a lot of clutter, or as we collectors call it memorabilia. I have in boxes somewhere in this house, letters that I received while I was serving overseas. I have letters that my father wrote to me after I moved away and we were separated by a thousand miles. I have copies of studies and papers that I wrote decades ago. All of these are on paper. (Side Note#2: Yes, I know about microfiche and microfilm, but let’s be serious here. Who has a reader in their house, or the time to run down to the local library every time you want to see if your great aunt’s recipe for banana bread used one or two eggs?)

After you’ve read this you will go on to another site and you will have no record of what you have read. (Side Note #3: That is unless you have taken my advice of some months back and saved all of this stuff to your computer just in case I someday become a famous writer.) We basically know the thoughts of other people from the past by what they have written. Sometimes that can be creative and sometimes just remembered. Take our friend William Shakespeare, or Will to his friends. If his plays had been performed and not written down, the audiences who saw them at the Globe Theater might have a memory of the play but we in the 21^st century would never have had the pleasure of reading Romeo and Juliet.

Books are a wonderful way of keeping the words of others for all time. But even those can be supplemented by letters written by the authors. Those letters often add clarity and meaning to the words put into the books. Not to mention they are a great source of the gossip of the day. Letters written to lovers, brothers, and others can tell of the feelings and opinions of the writer as no formal recitation can match. (Side Note #4: Here we have to separate the written word placed on paper and shipped through the mail or messenger, from that which has arrived as E-mail. For it is only the very best of us who remember to save separately the important “letters” we have received through the E-Mail system. The rest of us become disgusted as we realize that we now have fifteen pages of E-mails in our in-box, and choose to delete the last five years of messages. Only to later remember that the only place we had where our fathers named the dog that we had when we were babies was in that letter he wrote the year before he died.)

If you don’t believe in the value of letters just go back to one written by Pliny the Younger, where he wrote about surviving the eruption of Vesuvius. “In addition, it seemed as though the sea was being sucked backwards, as if it were being pushed back by the shaking of the land. Certainly the shoreline moved outwards, and many sea creatures were left on dry sand. Behind us were frightening dark clouds, rent by lightning twisted and hurled, opening to reveal huge figures of flame. These were like lightning, but bigger.”  Now that’s something you don’t get from the Disney version of the event. Truly “you had to be there.”

Not only letters tell what the writer is feeling. Some of us keep diaries, where we record our most intimate thoughts. Alright perhaps not intimate, but certainly personal. At some point we’ve all probably read the “Diary of Ann Frank.”  She wasn’t preparing a tome for the ages, or a magazine article that would be passed through an editor. She was a frightened girl, in hiding, and afraid for her life. She had paper and pen and the will to record her thoughts. Those thoughts tell of her feeling as she had them and not a rendition of what some might have remembered long after the war. Memories are fleeting and altered by later perceptions of the events.

What does all of this have to do with “immortality?” Do people who write letters live longer? No, and in Ann Frank’s case they barely had time to live at all. What the letters and diaries provide is a form of immortality. Those memories of their thoughts and feelings live beyond them and remain accessible to us, as if they were standing right here with us in the room. They provide an opportunity to listen to them, even though they are no longer here with us.

So close up this site and get paper and pen. Write a letter to your friend, your brother, lover. Considering what we’re celebrating this weekend, make it a letter to your mother. Tell them how you feel, and ask how they are doing. You might even ask your mother the name of that dog.

Happy Cinco De Mayo

What a great idea to celebrate the number five. I will admit that I’ve never had a true love for five, but all things considered it really is a swell number, and it doesn’t get the credit it deserves. I mean here it is giving of its self, three times on every monthly calendar without being given a single ten series. Whenever we look at unusual births, who gets the notoriety? Not Five, nope today six or even eight gets all the press. Fifty years ago five children born at the same time was all the rage. Quintuplets were as rare as hen’s teeth. (Side Note #1: Hens really don’t have teeth. The rumor was started back around 1900, when Diamond Jim Brady was down at Coney Island trying to break the whole chicken eating record. The previous record of seven chickens at one sitting in less than an hour had held for over twenty years. Brady was already past eight when he noticed the time was almost up. He stuffed two chicken legs and half a breast in his mouth at the same time and started to choke. He coughed up the mess just as the clock expired. When he was told that he wouldn’t get credit for the last chicken, he looked down at the plate in front of him and saw that there was a tooth on the plate. He claimed that it wasn’t a fair contest since someone had given him a chicken hen with teeth, and everyone knew that they were very rare and very tough. He got a do-over the next week and broke the record with nine chickens.) (Side Note #2: If you don’t believe the Jim Brady story, look up the “History of Gluttony on the Beach.” There they talk about the original eating contests that were sponsored by Clucky the Chicken. Their catch phrase “Clucky’s chicken, you’ll gobble it up,” was on all of the billboards at the beach before 1916. Yes I know some of you who are not city folk realize that it’s turkeys that go gobble, gobble, not chickens. However, down at the shore they didn’t know about turkeys or chickens that didn’t come fried or baked. The hot dog folks came in afterwards and had better publicity, so Coney Island went off chickens and embraced hot dogs.)

Today we have moms who give birth to eight at a time. I mean really, who would want to celebrate Ocho De Mayo. Well any rate we celebrated Cinco by going out to a movie. We went to see “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” I know you’re asking why did we go to see an English movie about a place in India? To be fair it was the fifth movie listed in the paper. Yeah I know, if I’d read a little farther down the page I might have looked at “The Five-year Engagement,” but is that really any more in keeping with the day? Besides “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” had Judy Dench and she’s a Dame. And we all remember that “there’s nothing like a dame.”

I know that I started this blog to talk about writing, but someone had to write the screen play for the Marigold Hotel movie. They even give out an Oscar for writing the best one each year. You remember the Oscars don’t you? That’s the show that we all watch to see who is wearing the most revealing gown of the night. (Side Note #3:  Did you see how I said “Gown” instead of “Dress?” That proves that I watch it for the fashion and not the amount of skin. Yeah, and if you believe that then I read “Playboy” for the articles. Well actually I do red the “New Yorker” for the cartoons.)

Seriously folks it’s a great movie. A group of people decide to move to a retirement home in India for various reasons. As they say in the TV promo for the movie, “It’s like the coast of Florida, but with more elephants.”  The visuals are worth the price of admission. Now I’ve never been to India, but after seeing the movie I might be tempted to go for a visit. I should warn you that there’s no sex, well not much and it’s not on screen. Also no robots, vampires, or werewolves. It will not win the picture of the year, but sometimes you go to the flicks just to see a good story. And I’m all about good stories.

(Side Note #4: My apologies to my friends who celebrate the Mexican holiday of Cinco De Mayo. The Mexican victory over the invading French in 1862 is every bit as good as our celebration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.)

Why do Readers Read?

Why do Readers Read?

I’ve spent some time thinking about why I and others write. I’ve also considered what it is that we write about. Today I asked myself “Why do people read what is written?” Because it’s there? I doubt the answer is that simple, otherwise more of you would have gone to Kindle and downloaded “Time Out” by that up and coming author, Cliff Tomaszewski.

I think that it is a given that all authors read. Although I have to admit that when I look at the sheer output of authors such as James Patterson I can’t imagine when they find time to read. I mean think about it, just how much free time did Leo Tolstoy while writing “War and Peace?” Over 1,440 pages in English, and over 587 thousand words. Of course a lot of those words were synonyms for “doom” and “gloom.”

Still Tolstoy probably did take some time off while he was writing, and he probably used it to read. I would think that he looked for something light like “Das Kapital,” Marx’s cheerful look at the capital markets of the day. Of course he might have gone for that fictional uplifting tale “Hans Brinker.” I’m sure you all remember the tale of a young Dutch boy who dreams of wining an ice skating race with wooden ice skates, while fretting over his father who has been injured and can no longer support young Hans, his sister, and mother. Good times those 1860s

But back to the question of the day, “Why do we read?” I’m going to leave aside any discussion of non-fiction works that are published primarily to help insomniacs gain repose. While I enjoy a good discussion of the reasons that American cities are failing, I’d rather not go into the finer points here on this Blog.

I suspect that many, if not most, read to go somewhere else. They are trying to find someplace where they might be happier, more peaceful, excited, or even loved. I’ve been in bookstores (Side note #1: Bookstores were brick and mortar buildings where people would go to buy books that were printed on paper.) where aisle after aisle were loaded with books about finding love. Apparently most of those places have clothing that has serious deficiencies in the front seams of men’s shirts. I assume that the people in those books all find love during the warmer months, as such ripped or torn clothing would be a significant hazard in the colder winter months.

Younger readers seem to gravitate towards books that can take them to places where the characters have some special powers. They can magically turn their enemies into harmless statues or small animals. It’s easy to think about why that would be desirous for small ones trapped in places where they cannot escape their persecutors.  Some of these fantasy places are populated with folks who can turn themselves into powerful beasts, able to overcome all opposition.

When I started out looking at the written word it was found on Mars, or in the jungles of some faraway place where great apes would foster human babies. Adventure fiction was my cup of cocoa. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs those were writers who could take me to places that I thought I’d want to be. Later in life I learned that Mars was a cold lifeless planet, and my time in the jungles of Panama and South East Asia proved that hot and rainy weren’t much better. Still traveling there in the magical pages of the books written about them was a wonderful experience.

More than a few years back I was in a theater at the midnight showing of the first “Harry Potter” movie. I was surprised as I looked around the theater waiting for the movie to start at the large number of children who were dressed in long black school gowns and were carrying sticks that I’m sure were magic wands to them. They had discovered the world of books and had been carried away to the land where magic really existed. It occurs to me now that those ten year olds sitting in that theater with me waiting to see how the written word would become moving pictures, are now about to graduate from college. I hope that they have retained the love of the written word throughout their school years, and still find the thrill of turning a page as exciting as flicking on a video game.

Of course I find it interesting that those same video games have now been transmogrified into books, where the reader can imagine what they can also see on the screens of their televisions. I wonder which they find more appealing. To be fair I’ve often gone to movies that were made from books, i.e. the Harry Potter series. In these cases I always like to read the books first so that I can see the character in my mind before a Hollywood casting director picks out an actor that they think will bring in the audience to see the film.

I’m afraid to think about why you are reading these words. I hope that you are enjoying them and will return to find more. In case you’re not, be sure to come back anyway just to see if I can write something that will appeal to your tastes.