Don't Have a Cow

 How do we define story?

Some people (too many people) define a story as anything with a beginning, middle, and end. Therefore I declare this cow is a story.

                                           Butchery for Dummies

Maybe that definition is a wee bit simplistic. After all, any phenomenon that is neither a single point nor infinite, that has terminal duration in space or time, can be divided into beginning, middle and end. So you when you’ve said that achingly obvious truism, you’ve said nothing.

Another hoary chestnut is that all art is self-expression. But this is small potatoes for an artist’s goal. A month-old baby can express itself perfectly well in order to have all its needs supplied, both material and emotional. As Teddy, the preternaturally enlightened little boy in Salinger’s eponymous story, says:

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

He goes on to illustrate how emotions are unnecessary, even in poetry:

“‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ “ Teddy said suddenly. “’Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve….Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff.”’

Art is not about feeling; it’s about seeing. Specifically, it’s about allowing the viewer to see the world through the artist’s eyes, from the artist’s vantage point.

So how to define story?

Pastiches

 

I'm going to share a secret with you: I don’t read Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Or at least, very few. And the better they promise to be, the leerier I am of them. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t read pastiches. What do you, think I’m crazy? No, remember I’m a writer, not a reader. Not that writers shouldn’t read pastiches. Far from it. I’m pointing the finger squarely at myself. You see, I’m a sponge. I’m a mimic. I’m very strongly affected by the last thing I’ve read. If I had been reading Dylan Thomas while I was writing The Strange Curse of Eliza Doolittle, I’d have had to name it Eliza’s Christmas in Wales. 

So I didn’t. I stuck to a steady diet of John Watson, M.D., with Pygmalion for dessert. A little taste: 

    Toby, of course, had long since joined his lop-eared dewlapped ancestors in the next life. Rather amazingly, Mr. Sherman, Toby’s owner, was still rattling along this mortal coil, still stuffing animals, still manning the shop in Pinchin Lane. We hung on his bell till we heard the window on the second floor being wrenched open above us. 

“Stand back, Watson,” said Holmes, pulling me aside. Glad I was that he did so; the first thing that came out of the window was a bucket of dirty water, which splashed to the pavement at our feet. The second thing was Sherman’s head in a nightcap. 

“Go away!” he yelled. “I’ll have the law on you!”

 Well, you say, everybody strives to sound like John Watson. And to that I say, some do, and some don’t. It’s not a matter of good or bad writing, it’s largely a matter of intention. For me, the music is of paramount importance. 

And then there’s the matter of edges. The territory a pastiche inhabits is the edges of the Canon. Luckily, Doyle left wide edges to work in. The stories are chock-full of detailed facts, but those facts are always about the case, and almost never about Holmes—or Watson. It’s all those details that a pastiche fills in. For instance, I know that Holmes kicked his

cocaine addiction with the help of Sigmund Freud, because long ago I read the Seven-Per -Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyers. This was long before I had any intention of writing a Holmes pastiche, before I even heard the word pastiche; as a matter of fact, it was my original inspiration (I’m probably not alone in that). 

But the point is, I can’t have that idea, because someone already had it, and executed it brilliantly. The more pastiches, especially good pastiches I read, the narrower the edges become. 

So, enjoy the pastiches. Hell, enjoy my pastiches. And I promise, when I move on from writing Sherlock Holmes stories, I’ll catch up on my reading.

Quiet Riot

San Francisco-- Americans were stunned by another act of senseless brutality this week when a San Francisco street performer went on a terrifying spree. Randy Heppelwhite, a San Francisco mime, was arrested by police yesterday after perpetrating what one onlooker called "one of the most hideously ambiguous performances I've ever seen." 

Union Square in the aftermath of the horror

"He jumped right out in front of a group of tourists, and without saying a word, he seemed to pull out a large caliber weapon of some sort," said Lars Chiswick, a manager at Banana Republic. "Some people were saying it was a revolver, some said a bazooka, but from the way he handled it, I'd say it was an automatic weapon, an Uzi or a Glock, maybe, the way he seemed to be spraying the whole square with hot lead. I saw people sitting down everywhere, walking away in panic. Very few people were tipping him, no large bills. One woman even hyperventilated. Then he tried to make his getaway on a unicycle, or it might have been a stegosaurus."

Breaking theme

As you're aware, I’m a novelist. Published. Traditionally. Three Sherlock Holmes adventures. But I’m not here to hawk them (not today). I just wanted to get that out of the way, because this post is about my fourth novel, which I’ve just finished, having finally discovered something crucial—my theme. I discovered it after adding one word to the text:

Pinocchio

(We’ll get back to that.)

You might think I’d have figured out theme before setting down word one. Or you might think the exact opposite, that theme is just a word cooked up by college professors to make reading a chore. Don’t hit me with them theme waves, man.

Don’t hit me with them negative waves.

Arthur Phillips on fiction

 

Arthur Phillips is one of my favorite writers working today. Perhaps his background as a jazz saxophonists or his record as a five-time Jeopardy champion informs his work, since he has six novels under his belt, and no two are alike in genre, style, or subject matter. He's an inspiration to any writer hoping to break out of the single-genre ghetto.

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

Favorite works

The Egyptologist

Prague

Angelica