Several years ago, my then
wife and our soon-to-turn 12-year old son (who’s now a college freshman) and I
went to see Eric Andersen, a 1960s folk singer we like, play at a small club in
a neighboring town. Andersen is one of these guys who travels by himself,
playing small clubs and bars here in the States (he’s a much bigger name in
certain parts of Europe but likes to come home and perform for us old hippies
every year or so) and accessible during intermission and after the show to sell
you some CDs, sign stuff or just talk. We had been to enough of his shows that
he recognized us as regulars. This was the first time we brought the kid, who
is a musician himself (a drummer, studying for about four years at that time).
After the show, we went up
to say hello. Our son told Andersen that he was also a musician, played in a
band (he still does, Palehound, which has become quite a thing on the East
Coast indie music scene), and asked Andersen if he had any advise for
performing. Andersen took our son aside and spoke privately to him for a few
minutes. After we’d said our good-byes and left we asked what the singer had
told him. This is, boiled down to its essence, what he said:
Don’t think. Thought is the enemy of art. And forget
about the audience. You’re not playing for them, you’re playing for yourself.
Make yourself happy and your audience will be happy too.
That’s pretty deep advise to
lay on a 12-year newbie, but I’m glad he did it, and I'm glad the kid had enough
on the ball to understand what the singer was saying; not that you have disdain
for the audience, but that you have respect for the music first and that will come through to the audience. I’ve been
telling the kid that his entire life, from the moment he could pick up a crayon
and started to worry or get frustrated about coloring outside the lines or
using the wrong color for Spider-Man’s costume.
There are no rules in art. There is no right or
wrong.
He asked me, several years
back, why he had to learn all these rules of grammar. He was never going to
need to know how to diagram a sentence in real life. Besides, I’m a
professional writer and I can’t articulate half the rules of grammar, plus, I
break the rules all the time when I write. True, I agreed, but at one time I did know them and could diagram a sentence and, to this very day, though I may not be
able to name the parts of speech (a dangling whatthewhosis?), I know when something is wrong and I can fix it.
And, besides that, I said:
Yes, I break the rules because there are no rules in art. And, before you start breaking the rules
for artistic (or any reason), you first have to know what the rules are.
I pointed out to him that as
a musician, he first had to learn how to read music, then play it by the
metronome and by the book before he started to learn jazz and how to improvise.
It reminds me of the legendary comic book artist Alex Toth, known for his (brilliantly!)
minimalist style, who said:
I spent the first half of my career learning what to
put into a picture and the second half what to leave out.
That’s art: Learn it, then
turn your back on it and make your own way. Just take the step. Don’t think
about it.
Doesn’t sound possible.
Writing—I’ll use writing as my example because that is, after all, what I do—is
a thought process, putting words on paper in a certain order to achieve a
specific narrative or emotional effect. Inform your reader of the locale or the
time period, describe a character or setting, evoke fear or sadness, make them
horny, whatever. You need to think about that before you jump in and start
writing. This stuff doesn’t just happen by itself.
Well…it doesn’t and it does. Sure, you sit down and say, okay,
in this scene, I want to achieve this
thing that either moves the plot forward or reveals something about your
characters, or both. In my mystery novel (a 1950s period
story), I have one scene intended to convey new clues to the police detective;
he’s talking to a waitress and short order cook in a diner and, while they drop
the requisite information and plot points under his questioning, the scene took
on a life of its own and became a set piece more about the character’s love of
pie (he eats 3 or 4 slices during the interview) and his integrity (he won’t
take the pie as a freebie and insists on paying because he intends to come back
often for the pie and wants to be a welcome visitor instead of a crooked cop on
the take).
If had thought about doing a character bit like that, it would have come
off as clunky and unconvincing, but by just letting it flow from the process of
writing the information I needed into the story, it turned into the one chapter
two out of the four people who have read/are reading it have mentioned.
The real heart of your story comes out in those moments, the unplanned
character bits, the spur of the moment inspiration that turns a minor character
into a major player…another thing that happened in my mystery; this having
elements of pastiche to it, I used the by-then deceased Julie Schwartz, a DC Comics editor since 1944 who I got to know thirty years later than the period in which the book is set, intending to
use him in one scene, just as a tip of the hat to a man for whom I cared very
much. But art knows no reason and Julie wound up coming back in later on in the
book and, in fact, ends being a sort of Dr. Watson to my detective’s Sherlock
Holmes—didn’t plan that, never would have planned that, but it happened and,
without thinking, I went with the flow.
Another example: in a
Justice Society of America novel I wrote a few years back, the heroes are all
down and about to bite the big one at the hands of the bad guys. The POV
character for the book, Mister Terrific, a one-time Olympic athlete, flashesback to his only competitive defeat, a loss by like 2/10th of a second becausehe allowed himself to be distracted by how his competitor was running his race.
It’s maybe 800, 1000 words out of 85,000, but that little flashback, the
frustration of not only reliving that moment but of repeating it now when the stakes weren’t a silver medal instead of
a gold one, but his and his comrade’s lives as well as the lives of countless
innocents, is one of four or five in the book that stand out to me as what these characters are about, not
just events that push the story forward (although they do that, too).
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| It's unpublished and likely to remain that way. Don't ask. |
Plotting is a mechanical
structure: One comic book I know creates elaborate charts of story direction,
individual character arcs, introduction of subplots, how long they play out,
secondary and tertiary subplots and how they evolve to become major subplot and
then the main plot. He can, on the down and dirty, connect the Leggos-level of
sheer mechanical plotting, wipe the floor with me. My plotting in comics, even
ones I wrote over two, three, or four year stretches, was usually ad hoc, based
on some broad outline that I, sort of, knew where it was headed. Unless I
changed my mind and went somewhere else because my free-form plotting allowed
me the room to do that. With his plotting, once you start pulling on one
thread, the whole sweater starts to unravel.
I’m not bound by the specs
of the plot-machine he builds for himself. He has said he envies my ability to
write that way, more from the gut and less from the head. The gut is where the
passion and the juice come from. The head is where rational thought lies. You
want about 25% of the latter and 75% of the former in your work. Know where you’re
going, understand the mode of transportation you’ve chosen to take you there,
but don’t be bound by some route you’ve laid out on the map before you even
left the garage. Take detours, visit interesting roadside attractions, cut
across land marked with “No Trespassing” signs, leave the blacktop and explore
some dirt roads, and stop every now and then for a couple or four slices of pie
at that diner you pass along the way.
Just do it, but whatever
else...don’t think!
© Paul Kupperberg
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