Tangent:…

(Tangent from the tangent: If one is of a schizophrenic persuasion, chasing impulse and flighty ideas like a dog spinning at cars on the freeway, is any thought really tangential? It’s not like we have a strong, solid baseline from which to diverge. Well, back to the initial thought.)

Isn’t it cool that storytellers rule the world? I find that truth to be totally awesome, to use a Dashnerism. (Dashnerism: noun—A word used with great frequency by James Dashner and which is, without exception, completely incongruous with the world of Jane Austin, unlike James’s name; common Dashnerisms include “totally”, “awesome”, and “totally awesome”.)

What do I mean? Simply that story is structure, as William Goldman says. This doesn’t mean that screenplays include three acts or that novels wrap up with a denouement, no more than consciousness means having the physical ability to sense the outside world. The truth is so much greater and grander and unfathomable than that. The structure of story is nothing less than meaning; story is the interrelating of stuff (anything really) in such a way that relevance can be drawn from the raw material of life, thought, and imagination.

I’ve been thinking about this since teaching an adult learning class on writing last night. (Thanks to Brenda Bench and her class for an interesting and enjoyable evening, as always.) The presentation was on using POV to achieve the three objectives of story simultaneously, and I got to talking about how we can only make sense of anything by incorporating it into a story. Here’s an example: China has a population of about 1.2 billion; the U.S. population is around 300 million. So tell me what that means. No, “China has more people that the U.S.,” doesn’t count. That’s like saying red and blue are different colors: meaningless. Can’t do it, can you—at least, not without placing these numbers into a story, such as: Because of their massive workforce, China will supplant the U.S. this century as the world’s greatest economic power because of its power; or, as environmental destruction and global climate change continue to intensify, China’s massive population will result in far greater negative consequences than the U.S.’s smaller citizenry, which is why China will not overcome the U.S. as the world’s dominant economy. One story is the story of environmentalism, one is of means of production. What are these, really, but perspectives or points of view and the narratives that go along with such?

No fact matters in isolation, only in conjunction with other facts. The structure of aligning information is story. Story is the substance of who we are as individuals, cultures, religions, nations, and even as a species. With that being so, a storyteller becomes something a good deal more than the proverbial daydreamer detached from things that really matter. We’re more akin to superheroes, possessed of mystical powers to manipulate reality according to our desires and designs. All the truly influential individuals in history have understood this or have benefited from someone who did, whether politicians, scientists, artists, business people, philosophers, or whatever. History isn’t just written by the winners; the meaning of life and its substance is created by the tellers of tales.

Which leaves only one question: am I, Clint Johnson, also known as R.D. Henham and a slue of less respectful appellations I won’t mention, a superhero or supervillain? There is a certain romanticism about being bad….

May one be a  super-anti-hero? Now come on, there’s no way a question that important could be considered tangential.

And I love scrums. 

So, after my diatribe on non-fiction (to which I am prone, periodically) and its having its own celebratory month, like NaNoWriMo, ForeverTeal pointed out a few supposed holes in my claim of a fiction centered cosmos.  I will address each of these in order below. 

ForeverTeal wrote: 

Response from “The World Out There”:

April - National Poetry Month, complete with NaPoWriMo established in 1996 (3 years before NaNoWriMo) by the American Academy of Poets (to reject poetry as a nonentity would be to disown W.H.Auden whose work you have claimed to enjoy though not understood which men never can anyway per your conclusion that emotion is a purely feminine construct); also National Card and Letter Writing Month.

While I do like Auden (E.E. Cummings, Poe, and Lewis Carroll also have work I enjoy), I don’t think that affection extends to a claim of ownership.  As for the existence of a poetry month, well, of course!  What else do you do with an endangered species?  You give it its own preserve to try to keep it breathing.  (I don’t say this with relish; quite the contrary.  While poetry is not my proverbial cup of tea, it is a near religion to others, and I don’t think we’re better off for its precipitous decline over the last sixty or so years.)  More to the point, poetry is far closer to fiction than non-fiction because of its emphasis on meaning (which is emotionally predicated).  Fiction is about truth—or you could say meaning or relevance.  Non-fiction, especially of the narrative variety, aspires to that, but always within the burdensome constraints of fact and veracity.  By striving for both ends, it knows it can achieve neither.  Meaning requires interpretation, and interpretation pollutes fact.  Uninterpreted facts (which means unorganized facts) are meaningless, while interpreted facts are not pure.  Poetry, like fiction, emphasizes meaning to the point of disregarding veracity when needed, in most cases.  Because of this kinship, I find it reasonable to offer poetry a month without risking the unraveling of all creation. 

As for a month dedicated to letter writing, this is clearly a memorial, as letter writing is dead.  Sad but true.  At least there isn’t a National Texting Month.     

November - in addition to NaNoWriMo, Family Stories Month (family stories usually being memoirs/bios/autobios which are generally nonfiction though not always purely) and National Life Writing Month; also Dear Santa Letter Month

Let’s be honest: most family stories are fictional.  They may be “based on a true story,” but ask any genuine non-fiction writer just how much respect that term deserves.  Family stories aren’t about what happened; they’re about how people responded to what happened.  That response is so important that it tends to change over time with the needs of the family.  This need for change is so powerful that the catalytic event will change as well so as to better fit the interpretive needs of the storytellers over time.  When a family or life story is recorded well, it communicates a genuine emotional response to something.  When fiction is written well, it does the exact same thing.  The factual basis of what provoked the emotional response is, largely or completely, irrelevant.  If I write a contemporary novel well and tell you it’s true, and you believe it, its impact on you is that of non-fiction.  Veracity has nothing to do with any of this; the perception of veracity does.  The only life stories that can truly be categorized as bordering on factual are listed dates, names, and events done by strict chronology.  And come on, who wants a whole month of that?

December - National Write a Business Plan Month and Write to a Friend Month

The best way to ensure you have no friends is to speak and act always out of unpolluted honesty and to treat fact as immutable.  No friendship can survive without a kind and wise dose of periodic fiction.  Often times, the best in us is brought out by our friends telling us stories about ourselves that aren’t strictly true.  As for National Write a Business Plan Month, when did you last consider someone writing “Invent invisible glasses, sell a billion, get rich” less than fictional?  And I officially motion for December to be changed to National Write a World Domination Plan Month.   

Other months of interest:
January - National Book Blitz Month (feature book on a relevant website: 1,000 Places to See Before You Die [or atomize] - a nonfiction work)

The more non-fiction (true not merely named such) books such a site includes, the less relevant said site becomes.

February - Library Lovers Month (notice nonfiction genre sections when you next visit aforesaid institution)

You do know that those non-fiction sections are just for the books that haven’t been caught in their madeupness yet, right?

October - National Book Month (note the various forms of aforementioned genre)

This one you simply misunderstand.  As October is my birthday, this month is in celebration of my book.  Note that “Book” is singular, see?

December - Read a New Book Month (note that books come in the nonfiction variety and thus exist, noteably one Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass - a NONFICTION book I purchased yesterday, largely due to your recommendation of it at a workshop I attended. Care to retract any such non-entity statements?

Donald Maass’s books are good and, as non-narrative forms, they have a closer claim to non-fiction than most books that boast such.  Does that deserve a month in such books’ honor?  That’s really irrelevant, isn’t it.  After all, December is already taken: it’s National Write a World Domination Plan Month. 

Which begs the question: Are your opinions fictional or non-fictional? The implications of the first scenario are quite amusing. Those of the second mean you yourself are a non-entity.

If you define non-fiction as factual and verifiable, my opinions are closer to fiction—which does not mean unreal or unmeaningful.  Quite the contrary.  All our opinions move beyond pure documentation of fact; we move through this world making stuff up as we go.  The only difference is I don’t feel comfortable hiding that much of what I make up is actually made up.  I don’t hang a non-fiction trapping on it.  

Now, no quibbling, driveling, or dithering. Before you completely dissolve, please distill your atoms so that “Essence of Clint Johnson” remains as a trophy of my momentary victory and my antagonist’s demise in the latest battle of wits.

Warning to readers: this is what happens when you ask an innocent question and are subjected to public harangue. It is curiously a simultaneous honor and humiliation worthy regardless of some manner of retort.

Yes, this is exactly what happens, that is exactly how it feels.

(And just for the record, ForeverTeal is a good friend, and we pick on each other like this often.  So no comments about my being abusive, please.  After all, Teal knows that I’m the one perpetually picked on.)

A long post on the imaginary NaNoNonWriMo is coming, but it’ll take far more time that I have tonight.  So I thought I would share the news that not quite all females fall in love with jerks (which, if you’ve kept informed on the latest science, truly is news, because biology suggests that women, well,  often do).  That the females in question are water striders, I have decided, will not dampen my enthusiasm.  Though, now that I think about it, being irresistibly jerky does has a kind of forbidden fruit appeal…

Want to read about the amorous quirkiness of females, including human, find it here.  G’night.

ForeverTeal asked: “Are there any months for non-fiction writing?”

The answer is no, and is such on multiple levels.  Firstly, according to my knowledge, there is no national non-fiction book writing month (note that I kept all words lower case so as not to overemphasize something that does not exist).  I suspect this is because non-fiction doesn’t have the same romanticism as the novel.  (That’s right, ladies, all us novelists ooze romance.  Just look at Hemingway.)  We don’t talk about everyone aspiring to write the Next Great American Non-fiction Book, nor do we proclaim that every person in the world has one non-fiction book in them.  In fact, it strikes me that there are few things less romantic than writing non-fiction.  Which brings me to my secondary point…

Secondarily, there will never be a national non-fiction book writing month, both because such an idea is perverse and because NaNoFiWriMo just sounds silly (when compared to the dignity of NaNoWriMo).  To think of people all over the nation engaging in unified exertion to write in words imitations of things not in words that have actually happened…  The very idea is off-putting.  It would be like taking a month to celebrate mimes.  No, non-fiction aspires to pale recreation; fiction is Creation, with a capital C.  There is no doubt, in this writer’s mind, which is deserving of its own month.

And thirdly, there will be no national non-fiction book writing month because non-fiction is itself a fictional thing (meaning it doesn’t exist—no, I’m not joking, it really doesn’t exist).  If such a non-entity were attached to a chronological fragment of reality I have this sick feeling that the space-time continuum would unhinge, unravel, and undo itself in general.  I’m telling you, the fakeness of non-fiction is dangerous.

This is why there is no non-fiction writing month.

(If there is a non-fiction writing month, please, someone tell me, for I would like to be prepared when my atoms dissolve and disappear with the rest of the cosmos.)

I say that as an admission because, apparently, that fact that I don’t Tweet (is that right?) is quickly becoming a crime in the literary promotion realm.  But early on when I first heard about this new technology, I made an arbitrary decision (which describes most of my decisions) that I would be the last writer under the age of, say, seventy to Tweet anything to anyone for any reason.  (For those who doubt this, I swore the same solemn vow about refusing to own a cell phone, and I still live cell phone free.)  So while Neil Gaiman can light the world on fire with 255 or however many characters of text (he could probably do it with 4), politicians have a new realm for their snake-tongued soundbites, and their daughters can scandalize the public by sharing photos of their endowments, anyone reading this here will have to display the patience to plow through 250 or so whole words.   Maybe even more.  Bravo for those of you willing to brave the marathon!

*****

For those who aren’t aware, there’s a new Kurt Vonnegut short story—excerpted from a forthcoming volume of his unpublished fiction—that you can read for free in Vanity Fair.  It’s all about a woman who writes the story of her life and how her husband is this brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine, and sells said story, becomes rich, and all this ruins her life.  Anyone doubting that Vonnegut actually wrote the thing only need read that the story in the story takes place in “Hypocrites’ Junction” to know of its authenticity.  Read the story and improve your life, because this is what all Kurt Vonnegut stories do. 

For my part, I am determined to test his hypothesis.  I now intend to write lots of stories that sell for lots of money, draw inspiration for these from my brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife (Note to self: get brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife), and see whether it makes me miserable.  Preliminary results aren’t in yet, but I’m leaning a little more toward ”exultant” rather than “unhappy.”

*****

Random yet important thought (which characterizes most of my thoughts, I believe): Including the words ”based on a true story” on either cover of a novel—or anywhere in between—is one of the worst and most pointless ideas statistically possible, even from a random firing of neurons.  It’s like a highway slathered in mayonnaise.  I see many possible repercussions, but none that justify sticking the one with the other, and none of which I can possibly see as beneficial.  A novel means fiction.  It means “I made this up.”  How, exactly, does the qualifying “based on a true story” change that?  By indicating that some unidentified portions of the text to some unidentified degree correlate to some unidentified situations in the life of a person who may or may not be identifiable by the name used or, in many cases, would more accurately be described as an aggregate person combining several products of the above simple formula. 

What? 

You made the story say what you want, when you want, and where you want.  That’s fiction.  If all it took to make something “based on a true story” was correlation of inspiration to a “real” event there would be no such thing as fiction.  Every story ever written reflects the human experience of reality.  Every story is “based on a true story.”  In fact, every story is “based on the life story of its creator.”  All story is, therefore, “true.”  Not all story is factual.  (All the world’s—or worlds’, whichever you prefer—wisdom is rooted in semantics, after all.) 

So let’s get our terms right, okay.  If you’re writing a story that incorporates many facts you’ve uncovered about some person’s life or experience, and you change those when desired to craft effect, you’re writing a novel.  It’s fiction, so don’t go trying to invent some in-between quasi-realm where a story that didn’t happen will feel more tangible.  The moment a reader reads “novel” they, by necessity, doubt every word of every page in the book.  Whether things really happened or not becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

The point, I guess, is this: if you want to tell people what happened, do it as well as you can without sacrificing veracity, or as much of it as you can attain; if you just want to give people the best story possible, who cares which parts of the story were inspired by what.  And if you’re trying to do both without doing either completely, you’re ladeling more mayonnaise on your highway.  Go ahead if you want, but I’ve got this bad feeling that whatever else happens, as the day drags on I think things are likely to start stinking in the sun.