A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

by Peter Turchi

  Privately, we might be outgoing or shy, talkative or quiet, assertive actors or passive observers. But our alter egos, our narrators, are storytellers. Whatever grammatical point of view we choose, the narrator we create is, like a magician, asking for the audience’s attention, asserting control. The narrator promises to tell the reader something worth reading. The nature of that story or poem, its tone and content, is up to us; but key to the success of the work is our creation of the narrator, the speaker, the voice that can tell it most effectively.

  While this might seem obvious, a remarkable number of developing writers are reluctant to assume the authority of the storyteller, particularly when writing in the third person. This is one of the reasons that the limited third person, or a narrative adhering closely to one character’s thoughts and feelings, is much more common among beginning writers than the omniscient third person.24 And while many more writers are comfortable asserting the voice of a first-person narrator, a variety of problems arise when that narrator is someone very much like the author.25

  The poem, no matter how charged its content, will not survive on content but on voice. By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of speech—the clever grafts and borrowings, the habitual gestures scattered like clues in the lines—never convincingly substitutes.

  — LOUISE GLÜCK

  In the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, when Dorothy and her friends finally reach the Emerald City, they quiver in fear and awe at being in the presence of “the great and powerful” Wizard of Oz. But the wizard’s authority rests largely on reputation and rhetoric, and Toto, like most dogs, is not impressed by such things. Taking a curtain in his teeth, Toto pulls it aside to reveal an ordinary man speaking into a microphone, tugging frantically at various levers and knobs in order to create towers of flame and other indications of “greatness.” Exposed, he makes one last desperate attempt to maintain the fiction: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he tells them.

  The wizard exposed

  But the jig is up. The Scarecrow says, “You humbug!” The stammering would-be wizard (whose name, revealed in the novel, is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmanuel Ambroise Diggs, or O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.) ashamedly agrees, and Dorothy adds, “You’re a very bad man.” A bad man and, without his mechanical effects, not much of a wizard.

  Failed fiction can look a lot like failed wizardry: a combination of pyrotechnics, frantic motion, and unpersuasive claims. But successful fiction also has something in common with wizardry, as it issues from someone with a persuasive and enchanting combination of knowledge, wisdom, insight, attitude, and experience—and maybe even a few nifty tricks up her sleeve. What’s interesting about poor Oscar Diggs is that, once he’s forced to do without all his bluster and amplification, he’s reasonable, even mildly likeable. He points out that the Scarecrow has already demonstrated his intelligence, the Lion has already demonstrated his courage, and the Tin Man has demonstrated his good heart. While he’s a bit of a bumbler (he wound up in Oz when his hot air balloon was blown off course from Omaha), Oscar is much better off being Oscar than he is pretending to be a wizard.

  In fiction, there is always a man (or woman) behind the curtain. We might think of him as the author, the actual human being who sits at the keyboard or desk. The narrator he creates might sound a lot like him, but even if it does, the narrator is more polished, more articulate, more consistently aware of what he’s saying (and not saying) and why. And of course the narrator he creates might be dramatically different from him. Baum was, by all accounts, a bashful young man.26

  MIRRORS AND LENSES: LOOKING IN AND LOOKING OUT

  For centuries, mirrors had been used to reflect something. . . . Far less logical was that a mirror could reflect nothing. . . . In other words, something could be hidden by the use of a reflection. It was, very simply, an optical formula for invisibility.

  — JIM STEINMEYER, on a patent for an illusion filed by Joseph Maurice

  Because Houdini’s disappearing elephant failed to impress audiences, and because he dropped the trick from his act, no one knows exactly how he did it. Jim Steinmeyer suspects the illusion was a variant of one that debuted in April 1865 under the title “Proteus, or We Are Here but Not Here.” It went something like this: The magician stood onstage in front of a wheeled structure roughly the size and shape of a phone booth. The front doors were opened to reveal that it was empty. The magician rapped on the sides, back, top, and bottom of the booth, demonstrating that they were solid. The magician’s assistant stepped into the box. The magician closed the doors, waved his wand, opened the doors, and shazam—the assistant was nowhere to be seen.

  A common complaint about contemporary fiction in the United States is that it is overly concerned with the “domestic,” with the daily lives of ordinary individuals. The people who make that complaint often speak nostalgically of novels like Don Quixote and War and Peace; they urge writers to embrace the epic, or to think politically, to address large-scale societal concerns. But of course there never were many books like Don Quixote and War and Peace, and there is no shortage of awful novels dedicated to various political visions. Chekhov, a great short-story writer, avoided politics, focusing instead on individuals. Some of the most celebrated American writers, including Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, and James Baldwin, wrote directly from their own experiences, and some other cherished novelists, such as Barbara Pym, dedicated themselves to what might be considered “domestic” matters.

  The complaint that a great deal of contemporary fiction seems unlikely to stand the test of time can’t be argued, since most attempts at art don’t stand the test of time. But writing about politics and social concerns is not (necessarily) the answer. Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, was for many years thought to be a good but not particularly remarkable painting. For the last century or so it has been one of the most popular and highly valued paintings in the world—and it’s simply a portrait of an anonymous woman. It isn’t the mystery of her identity that has earned the painting a prominent place in our culture, and it certainly isn’t the landscape in the background, though that’s of some interest. No, what captivates viewers is the subject’s famously enigmatic expression: the hint of a smile, the look in her eyes. The image is both precisely detailed and mysterious, open to the viewer’s interpretation. That isn’t to say great art can’t be about political or social issues; of course it can. But content isn’t the defining element of great art. Vision is.

  So many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it.

  — FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Artistic vision is a label for a difficult-to-define combination of close attention, perception, understanding, intuition, and ambition, and none of that counts for much unless it is combined with remarkable execution, or the communication of that vision. Vision may not be teachable, but it can be cultivated. As the amateur astronomer who discovered Uranus, William Herschel, said, “Seeing is an art which must be learnt.” Most of the effective tools of communicating through poetry and fiction can be taught. Vision alone isn’t enough, and demonstrating it once is no guarantee of demonstrating it again. Chekhov, Twain, Porter, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway all wrote stories that are forgettable, and would be forgotten if not for the better work they also created.

  If you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just about being you, you start to communicate. . . . I will steal directly from life, [but] I don’t want to tell you all about me. I want to tell you about you.

  — Bruce Springsteen

  So: writing from one’s own experience does not, in itself, make it likely that a work will be good or bad. Writing about oneself under the assumption that others will necessari
ly be interested or moved, however, will nearly always doom a piece. While it’s perfectly understandable that we find our own lives fascinating, each reader has his or her own life that is, for him or her, much more important than ours. The greatest fiction connects the concerns of the author with the concerns of the reader. That connection doesn’t have to be explicit. As Walt Whitman reminded the world, universal experience can be expressed through the individual:

  I celebrate myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  The way we see the world is the lens that defines us.

  Writers typically begin at one of two extremes. Either we write work that is far from autobiographical, about wholly invented creatures in faraway places—or we write stories and poems that are transparently autobiographical. Writers at either extreme benefit from exploring different relationships between their experience and their work. Typically, writers in that first group are, eventually, encouraged to make more direct use of their experience (which can inform even the most fantastic fiction). Even fantasy and horror novels benefit from characters with identifiable human emotions, and the emotions we draw from most powerfully are our own. Typically, writers in the second group are encouraged to “gain some distance” from their experience. To write about one’s own experience without considering why and how it might interest a reader is to write from a sense of selfishness, or self-absorption, which often hampers communication. Even in the case of a celebrity autobiography, which the reader presumably picks up to learn about the author, the writing is most effective when it offers points of connection and understanding.

  CHOOSING A PLACE TO STAND

  A writer I know once succumbed to the lure of supposedly easy money by agreeing to help a man “polish” his memoir, which featured that man’s rediscovery of a gold mine in the Southwest. The mine, which predated the famous California gold rush, had been discussed and described in any number of popular books and articles and had been the subject of countless searches for over a century, and it was the subject of the usual tall tales and grisly stories of people who had “gotten too close,” only to meet some suspicious end. Given that he had proven at least some of the old stories to be true and the doubters wrong, the man’s tale had obvious appeal. (“If I can’t tell a good story about finding lost treasure, I should quit writing,” my friend regrets having said.) By the time my friend and the memoirist crossed paths, the events recounted in the (badly typed) manuscript were long over. To fill in holes, then, the writer had to interview the treasure hunter.

  A number of problems became evident, but the one that ultimately undermined the book was this: the treasure hunter couldn’t decide how he wanted to be depicted. Some days he wanted to be portrayed like a real-life Indiana Jones, a brave individual boldly taking action when people all around him were saying there was nothing to find, or it couldn’t be found, or whatever was found wouldn’t repay the risk and effort to find it. Other days, he wanted to be seen as the victim of shortsighted archaeologists, an evil corporate landowner, and some inconvenient laws. In a typical week, the treasure hunter would tell my friend a story over the phone, my friend would write it up and email the draft to a helpful woman who served as liaison (the treasure hunter believed certain unnamed agents of the government were reading his email and would take drastic action to suppress his story), the treasure hunter would read it over, and he’d want to change nearly every detail.

  To be fair, while his ambivalence made the work exasperating, both of the treasure hunter’s views of himself could be justified. On one hand, he had done something remarkable, difficult, and expensive, something countless people had tried and failed to do for nearly 150 years. On the other hand, archaeologists, landowners, and governments have their own interest in historically significant and potentially financially lucrative discoveries, and those interests are often at odds with those of someone whose primary objectives are to find something, bring it to light, and make a lot of money himself.

  The treasure hunter could be an engaging and persuasive storyteller, which is how he was able to raise the funds necessary for his extended search in isolated country, to persuade a local college to create a touring exhibit of artifacts he found at the site, and to convince my friend to work with him. But his mercurial relationship to his story was a serious problem; it impacted virtually every sentence, and of course it influenced the tone of the book. Who exactly was he trying to depict? To create what ultimate effect?27 The problem was never fully resolved. (Never: a few years after the book came out, the treasure hunter found another co-author and sold his story to another publisher.)

  One of the last things the book’s editor asked for was a new opening chapter. The publisher’s sales staff thought the book would find a wider audience if the treasure hunter was still active, in the midst of some new adventure. He wasn’t—he spent most of his time trying to persuade the national morning talk shows that he’d be the ideal guest—but the editor suggested it might be enough to “consider” a new adventure. So my friend, who had spent time in Arizona, did some quick reading on the famous Lost Dutchman mine and wrote a quick prologue describing the treasure hunter bushwhacking deep into the Superstition Mountains, narrowly avoiding Gila monsters (which aren’t actually dangerous, but they’ve got that great name), squatting in the shade of a towering saguaro to check his yellowed map, pausing to wipe his brow only to spy a scorpion nestled in the folds of his bandanna—you get the idea. The punch line? The treasure hunter said the prologue, a work of fiction, was his favorite part of the autobiography.

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  — WALT WHITMAN

  The treasure hunter’s dilemma is one we all face. Of all the possible stories we could tell about our experience, of all the approaches we could take, which one should we choose? How do we want to be seen, or understood? Why?

  Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.

  — ARCHIMEDES

  Here’s how the Proteus trick is done:

  The magician’s assistant steps into the phone booth–sized box and stands with her back against the back of the booth. When the doors close, she pulls toward herself two panels, one on each side. The panels have mirrors mounted on the side she can’t see—the side facing the audience. The mirrors meet at a perfect 45-degree angle, and the front edges have been treated so that there is no visible seam. Each mirror now reflects a side of the booth.

  Since the sides and back of the booth are identical (often simply black), when the doors are opened, the audience thinks it sees exactly what it saw before—the interior of a black box. The “disappeared” assistant is standing directly in front of them, behind the two panels—but because the mirrors are carefully angled, the box is carefully sized, and the theater’s lighting has been strategically placed, no member of the audience can see any unintended reflection.

  The Proteus cabinet, and the view from above if the cabinet top were removed.

  As with virtually any illusion, to know how it is done is to be profoundly underwhelmed. Everything—which is to say, the magic—is in the presentation.

  Here’s the challenging bit:

  Most viewers immediately assume that the booth has a false back. In order to persuade them that the booth is both solid and empty, the magician once again needs to rap on the sides of the box or to roll the entire box aside. But if his hand, wand, or body were to be reflected in either of the mirrors, the illusion would be ruined. And so the magician has to learn precisely where to stand, and how to move.

  The “safe zone,” determined by the size of the cabinet and the angle of the mirrors, is the area the magician can stand in or pass his hand or wand through without ruining the effect. The success of the presentation, the art to the illusion, lies in the magician’s moving gracefully, apparently unselfconsciously
, even though he is in fact doing everything possible to work the boundaries, to stop just short of disastrous exposure.

  Many variations of this illusion were created, and they’re still performed today. A common one is a box that appears to be empty, but from which the magician pulls all sorts of apparently large objects. One variant involves a three-legged coffee table, where the mirrors run between the legs. The table has a trap door, and the “art” is in the ability of the assistant to drop down through the door and contort herself into the space between the table legs quickly and silently.

  It took quite a while for magicians to discover how to use different angles for mirrors, but eventually solutions were found, so that even audiences who thought they were above being tricked by mirrors were, again and again. Which is to say, once audiences became aware of how an illusion was created, the “magic,” or sense of wonder, was gone, forcing magicians to find new methods to produce the same essential effects. Archimedes was talking about physics: with a long enough (and sturdy enough) lever, and a well-chosen fulcrum, or pivot point, an ordinary person can move a remarkably heavy object. A writer chooses the best place to stand based in part on proximity to the material and on his desired relationship with the reader. The most remote stance might be seeming objectivity—the narrator is offstage, or in the wings. The most intimate stance might be that of the poet or fiction writer who openly acknowledges drawing from life and who blurs the boundary between fact and invention, like Houdini—or is that Erik Weisz?—himself.