by Peter Turchi
But reductive reading could make anyone’s work look bad. From that perspective, John Cheever wrote about suburban alcoholics, Jane Austen wrote love stories, and Poe was a madman writing about madmen. Rather than be disappointed or embarrassed when we feel we’re repeating ourselves, we need to investigate further. We need to work to recognize the difference between mere repetition and meaningful variation. We need to commit to an intensity of gaze that will allow us to see beyond what we’ve already comprehended. Our obsessions and constraints define us. We must cultivate them.
This isn’t to say that a writer needs to be obsessed by some particular content. Ultimately, we each follow our own interests, or what we might think of as the Muse, unpredictable as she seems to be. So while we might cultivate, through conscious exploration, situations, problems, characters and/or themes, we might also, or alternately, explore aspects of process, form, and style. Milan Kundera says that when a critic pointed out that he tended to write his novels in seven sections, he seized the revelation as an opportunity to further develop his structural inclinations. Don DeLillo considers the physical appearance of words in a sentence.7 From Dante and Petrarch, Wordsworth and Shakespeare, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, there is no end of examples of poets who have chosen the sonnet as a vehicle for exploration. By sustaining an investigation of any aspect of content or form, we can learn to dwell in our work. To dwell—to reside—to inhabit.
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
— EMILY DICKINSON
Sustained attention requires consciously resisting the temptation to keep moving, to get through a piece, to be finished. This may never have been popular—we are, most of us, eager to see results, to move forward—and deliberately dwelling might seem like a particularly antiquated notion now, when so much in our world emphasizes speed: faster connections, faster movement, faster responses.
To learn to dwell in our work is to use drafts to explore, with the understanding that our movement toward the final draft of a story or poem or novel is likely to include not only lateral movement but backward movement, and circular movement, and movement we can’t confidently describe. Because to insist to ourselves that each draft carry a story toward closure is, necessarily, to limit the possibilities. Every choice must then at least seem to be an improvement on what’s currently on the page, part of a straight-line progression, rather than an alternative to what’s on the page, movement within a larger plane. We need to allow ourselves to pursue hunches, to discover, in the words of Robert Sternberg, nonobvious pieces of information and, even more important, nonobvious relationships between new information and information already in our memory. Like Joseph Heller and Robert Gottlieb taping bits of manuscript to every surface in the editor’s office, and Charles Ritchie affixing those attempts at printmaking to the wall of his studio, we need to give ourselves time to make images and move them around inside our heads, and on paper, in new arrangements.
Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity . . .
— T. S. Eliot
Dwelling is not the same as standing still. Emily Dickinson didn’t simply stare out the window all day. To dwell is also to occupy, to linger over.
BUILDING BRIDGES
A few years ago, a team of biochemists at the University of Washington decided to enlist the help of nonscientists to solve a complicated problem. Their goal is to learn about proteins, and even to create new proteins to fight disease. The problem is that while proteins form according to certain apparent rules, there are so many potential combinations and arrangements of components that not even high-speed computers can efficiently consider all the possibilities. Protein creation is a story with infinite possibility, and no clear path to the end.
The biochemists enlisted help from the university’s Center for Game Science to turn protein creation into an online puzzle video game called Foldit. The website includes some introductory information, but no background in science is necessary. Given a few basic rules, the user—the player—is invited to solve a series of puzzles, which progress in difficulty. The puzzles are designed to teach protein-building strategies, and are constantly revised in order to do that more effectively. Users can then move on to more complicated tasks, competing with players around the globe.
News stories about Foldit tend to say that the game is enlisting lay-people to help create proteins and potentially cure diseases, but that’s not quite accurate. As the site itself explains, the goal of the game is actually to collect information about how people address the problem of solving protein-making puzzles—and then to build those problem-solving strategies into the computer programs currently being used. A video game is being used to cultivate obsession toward a particular end.
Foldit puzzle 697
In a similar way, exercises and imitations and focused revisions help initiate a writer into the complexities of prose and poetry. With patience, we can train ourselves to write not only with an end product in mind but for the rewards of a single draft, the possibilities of a sentence, the subtle but significant variation in a constellation of characters we’ve seen in our work before. And if we happen to have obsessions that seem unwriterly—if we find ourselves spending hours sewing, or building rock walls, addressing administrative challenges, studying old maps, practicing magic tricks, or solving puzzles—we might do well to consider how that could inform our writing, in content or in practice.
My wife believes my puzzle-solving is a sign of idleness. So do I, most of the time. And while I’d like to think that whatever hours I’ve devoted to crosswords and cryptographs and double acrostics and logic problems and sudoku will pay off in years of additional mental alertness, when I consider my current state of mental alertness, the outlook seems dim. But writing this book—like writing any book—has been a long process, one requiring obsessive attention as well as the extended pursuit—and, sometimes, abandonment—of many hunches. Those hours of pursuing solutions, of refusing to settle for nearly finishing a puzzle, is an exercise in persistence that pays benefits when applied to significant challenges.
Four writers, close friends, have each completed their first books and are invited to meet a famous and influential editor. She’s read all their work and was surprised to find that she admires it all equally. After meeting them, she realizes that if she publishes any one or two of these writers, their friendship will suffer terribly. So the editor presents them with a puzzle.
The editor sends the first writer to another room. She instructs the other three to arrange their chairs in a line so that each writer can only see the writer(s) in front. No peeking. (And there are no mirrors in the office.) Then she explains that she’s going to give each writer—including the one in the other room—a book to balance on his or her head. Two have red covers, two have black covers. The writers can’t see the books on their own heads, and the writer in the other room can’t see or be seen by the other three. The writers can’t talk (or pass notes, send texts, use hand signals—you get the point).
The deal: if the first writer who speaks can tell the editor the color of the cover on his or her own head, she’ll publish all four of their books. If the first writer who speaks is wrong, she won’t publish any of them.
You need to know: the four writers, unlike a lot of writers, are perfectly logical; and they know each other well enough to trust one another to respond logically.
How do the writers get published?
I don’t believe that studying math will eventually yield knowledge of all dark things, but some combination of observation and contemplation—specifically, seeing patterns in how marriages and families tend to work—eventually led me to understand what was going on during those childhood bridge games. My mother’s parents, Dutch/Germans whose families had been in this country for many generations, did not approve of my first-generation Italian American father. My mot
her was very close to her parents, so she found herself caught between a young, hot-tempered husband and a quiet, frowning father. The appropriately named card game provided a way for her to bring her husband and her parents together and allowed them hours of casual conversation, week after week. The result was an intimacy that might otherwise have been impossible. By her own admission, our mother wasn’t very good at cards, and the long days of working and taking care of two children sometimes had her nodding off mid-hand, spilling clubs and hearts onto the table. But in one way she was the canniest player: she had arranged the game, and she knew what it was really about.
1 No longer a part of the test. Alas.
2 The challenge being, then as now, to ask just one question of one of the twins in order to know which road to take.
3 You remember: A boy has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river. He has a small raft, and it can only carry him and one other thing. If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken. If the chicken and the corn are left together, the chicken will eat the corn. How does the boy get them all across the river?
4 The actual number of distinct 9x9 grids was calculated by Bertram Felgenhauer and Frazer Jarvis to be 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960.
5 This describes standard sudoku, the kind that appear in most newspapers; there are many variants.
6 For more on constraints in fiction, including a discussion of the Oulipo, see “A Rigorous Geometry” in Maps of the Imagination.
7 “There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. . . . The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence—these are sensuous pleasures. I might want very and only in the same sentence, spaced a particular way, exactly so far apart. I might want rapture matched with danger—I like to match word endings. I type rather than write longhand because I like the way the words and letters look when they come off the hammers onto the page—finished, printed, beautifully formed.”
HOW, FROM SUCH WRECKAGE, WE EVOLVE THE EVENTUAL EFFECT
Now, it is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder . . . the difficulty is to keep organization in the midst of mystery.
— JOHN RUSKIN
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S SECRET
Like many a sheepish puzzle fan before and after him, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack was not being entirely honest when he suggested that Magic Squares weren’t worthy of his time. In his autobiography, Franklin confesses, “In my younger days, having once some leisure which I still think I might have employed more usefully, I had amused myself in making these kind of magic squares,” and goes on to claim that, as an adult, in the course of a single evening, he composed a 16 × 16 magic square—one that is considered remarkable to this day.
The rows and columns of Franklin’s magic square add to 2,056. While the main diagonals do not, the bent diagonals—for example, 200, 39, 230, 5, 9, 234, 43, 204, 181, 86, 151, 120, 124, 155, 90, 185—do. Each half row and half column adds up to 1,028. Furthermore, Franklin explained, “a foursquare hole being cut in a piece of paper of such a size as to take in and show through it just 16 of the little squares, when laid on the greater square, the sum of the 16 numbers so appearing through the hole, wherever it was placed on the greater square (for example, 246, 12, 244, 14, 11, 245, 13, 243, 22, 236, 20, 238, 43, 213, 45, 211), should likewise make 2056.” And does.
We might remember Benjamin Franklin best as a statesman, or as a mythic figure flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but he was also a puzzle composer and solver. His close observation of the world around him and his curiosity about what he saw led to his inventing the lightning rod, making discoveries related to meteorology and evaporative cooling, and proposing a solution to a curious puzzle regarding transatlantic mail delivery. When he served as deputy postmaster, Franklin looked into a complaint that the mail from England took substantially longer to get from Britain to New York than it did to get from Britain to Rhode Island. He learned that captains of the mail ships were sailing directly against the Gulf Stream, which he named and charted. When the ships avoided the current, they reached New York two weeks faster.
Benjamin Franklin’s map of the Gulf Stream
In addition to books of puzzles, there are other kinds of books we might read and dispose of quickly, only to buy another when our desire, our appetite, can no longer be suppressed: genre novels. Genre novels work, to varying degrees, both to satisfy our expectations of form and to stand apart as unique creations. The plotting of a classic detective story appeals to our rational side, not only at the end, when whodunit, why, and howitdone are made clear, but all along the way. The detective story offers the reassurance of order, of the ability of the human mind to make sense of what, at some point, seemed senseless. The classic detective story offers a world of answers and logic, a world in which problems can be not avoided, but solved.
I’ve been saying “detective story” and not “mystery” in part to identify a specific subgenre, but also to avoid confusion. To define two key terms, it might be useful to hear from an unlikely literary resource: Gregory F. Treverton’s Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information.
The Cold War legacy of intelligence was a vast capacity to solve strategic puzzles, . . . ones that could, in principle, have been answered definitively if only the information had been available: How big was the Soviet economy? How many missiles did the Soviet Union have? . . .
Different from a puzzle is a mystery, which is a question that cannot be answered with certainty even in principle. Russia’s inflation rate this [coming] year is a mystery. . . . No one [knows the answer]. The mystery is real. . . .
Today’s chaotic world still throws up plenty of puzzles to be solved. Whether China sold M-11 missiles to Pakistan is a puzzle. So is whether France bribed Indonesia to give a contract to a French company. Yet most of the critical questions facing American foreign policy are mysteries: Will North Korea fulfill its nuclear agreement with the United States? . . . Will China continue to grow rapidly, or will it fragment?
By these definitions, most of the narratives commonly called “mysteries” are, in fact, puzzles—which is to say that everything we need to know can be known, and by the end of the story or novel is known. True mysteries are questions we are compelled to contemplate but cannot expect to answer with certainty. The examples of mystery Treverton offers are questions about the future that will, ultimately, have answers—they were only mysteries when he was writing. This might make it seem as if every mystery can eventually become a puzzle, if only we wait long enough or, looking to the past, if we do enough research. But we will never know exactly what George Washington was thinking and feeling as he crossed the Delaware, no matter what references he might have made in letters or in conversations that someone recalled later. We’ll never know if Abraham Lincoln heard a strange sound behind him that April night in Ford’s Theater, or what mixture of pride, satisfaction, and ego was felt by the hairy guy (or gal) who made the first wheel.
A fundamental distinction between what is often referred to as genre fiction and what is often referred to as literary fiction is that in genre fiction questions of plot (what happened), character (who did it), and even human motivation (why the character did it) are treated as puzzles—questions that can be answered—while literary fiction is more inclined not only to tolerate but to focus on true mystery.8 In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, we never know exactly what happened in the Marabar Caves; in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the reader is left to sort out Thomas Fowler’s professed and unstated motivations for aiding in the murder of Alden Pyle. The
first type of fiction is interested in telling stories in which virtually everything can be explained. The second is interested in telling stories about a more complicated world, one that more closely resembles the one we live in.
That isn’t to suggest that either type of fiction is easy to create. A pleasing detective story needs to engage readers in a sufficiently complicated and intriguing problem and resolve it in satisfying fashion. A story that means to reveal or acknowledge mystery needs to define that mystery clearly, and provide a satisfactory shape, including a sense of closure, or completion, despite the fact that the central mystery cannot be resolved. A story filled with unfocused mystery—a story in which we don’t know if the main character is male or female, or young or old, or human; or if the setting adheres to the physics of the world as we know it; or if the tone is meant to be serious or satirical; or if the main character is meant to be sympathetic, or there’s anything in particular he wants—is likely to collapse under the weight of uncertainty. Beginning writers sometimes make the mistake of creating “mystery” by making situations and even sentences either vague or impenetrable; the result isn’t mystery, but a mess. Mystery may be a condition (“Their meeting was shrouded in an air of mystery”), but for writers it is also a tool.