Authorless

I'm totally baffled. Where does it come from? Thousands upon thousands of words, each line hammered and polished, each paragraph a composition in song, because it has to sing. Well, fine. A few sentences and graphs, maybe a page or two. I can understand that easily enough, the craft of writing. But where do characters come from? Situations that build from first page to last, whole lives that collide and sizzle.

Chandler said that believability was a matter of style. He didn't speak about how characters come to life, every breath, every sniff as loud as my own. All of them, bit players and extras, a whole city of men and women, no two alike, except for siblings who dislike each other and old married couples who frown at each other and bite their tongues.

I bothers me that I've slipped into first person and can't seem to get out. Chandler tempted me, the rotter. There ought to be a traffic sign on every keyboard, Do Not Enter. Now that I think about it, Robert Louis Stevenson did it, too, first person voice of Davey Balfour, without which Kidnapped would have been a remote dull tale. A lot of respectable writers have used third person omniscient, although many more failed miserably. I used third person in Mars Shall Thunder, my first novel, thought that that's what writing a novel entailed, like Ayn Rand and Scott Fitzgerald and Agatha Cristie. I look back on it now as an empty hollow bucket. First person ruined me as a reader, pushed me into a corner from which there is no escape.

Writing in the flesh and bone of a living man with headaches and laughter and love, a whole inventory of sensitive fingers and crackling mental experience, is the most drect way to tell a story that matters, because it matters to a real person in real time.

Another thing bothers me. I write in vignettes, in scenes that are whole and complete with mechanical transportation and other dull moments excised, unless the experience of travel and perhaps boredom are significant, revealing, a stage set and lit and framed for a reason, the business of thinking. People think all the time. Or my people do. Why would I pour days and nights and months into  a story of mental vacancy?

I use tricks, but few. Men are tempted and women fall in love. Puzzles fascinate, every little remark by a friend that suggests something withheld or an inexplicable blockheadedness. Most people are transparent. Mysteries have to be constructed with focused effort to conceal something, deep waters with a calm surface. Penetrating the truth of people who withhold vital information always seems the most interesting thing to do.

I let my guy tell wry jokes, especially with a humorless pal, a natural foil. I let him weep and go to pieces after he kills a man. His love affair with the right girl is transcendant. She laughs, cries big tears of gratitude, clings to him tightly and won't let go, abandons him because she can't face the prospect of his death.

Silly girl. The main character in a story told first person can't die, else there would be no one to relate what happened.

In Finding Flopsie, the concept required two narrators, two books married in sequence, the way Chris saw it and, separately, how Peachy witnessed many of the same events. Male authors have no business attempting to occupy a woman's POV, her physiology and hormone flux. Perfectly fair and proper for female novelists to write about male psychology. We're simple creatures, almost one dimensional compared to the ordered chaos of a feminine personality. I suppose gays likewise have some depth of complexity, uninteresting to me as a relatively simple straight guy. Seeing women at their best is to honor them passionately. To wrestle with them is exasperating.

My first person main character (and narrator) is always a better man than I am. His limitations are few and natural, can't be in two places at the same time, can't be asleep and wide awake simultaneously. It takes time to scrape the ice off a windshield in harsh Wisconsin winter. If he's nervous, there's mortal danger straight ahead, something that he's never done before. Nothing like me. I've carried a gun, had to jack a round in the chamber and flip the safety off, but I've never killed a man, thank God. I know just enough about life to invest my characters with the irreducible imperatives of combat on a frozen city street at night.

That, however, is not what's bugging me. Where, oh, where do 68,000 words come from? -- every scene alive and real. I don't recall writing a completed story, and it cannot be altered. Very strange, as if the story wrote itself, authorless.