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

by Peter Turchi

  “Not one inch,” his father reminded him, face looming at the window before locking the truck door, slamming it, and crossing the sidewalk. He slapped the wallet in his back pocket, cinched his hat, drew breath to make himself tall, and disappeared through the dark entryway of the bar.

  The dilemma has—or rather, the dilemmas have—been set up with tremendous economy, and that’s possible because, while the situation is familiar, a classic—we’re told something bad has happened, that there will be hell to pay if it happens again, and then we’re shown strong indicators that it’s about to happen—as readers we have been artfully misdirected. The author has put the opening cards on the table, but at least some of them are face down. The opening of “Strike Anywhere” shifts our attention from a minor mystery to a more significant one.

  On some level or another, nearly every successful story works this way, leading us from one specific unknown to another, like stepping stones across a river. But just as important as the stepping stones—those secure places to rest our feet that make our progress possible—are the spaces between those stones, and the water rushing through those spaces. In Nelson’s story, omitted and withheld information represents the difficulty. And while this might seem like a narrow, shallow stream to cross—few if any readers would be inclined to give up in frustration—by increasing the span of the river, by increasing the spaces between the stones, by deepening and hastening the water, difficulty can be increased.

  Letters in the sentences “Roses are red, violets are blue” are scrambled by the following procedure. The words are written one below the other and flush at the left:

  roses

  are

  red

  violets

  are

  blue

  The columns are taken from left to right and their letters from the top down, skipping all blank spaces, to produce this ordering: rarvaboreirlse-doeuelesets. The task is to find the line of poetry that, when scrambled by this procedure, becomes tinflabttulahsoriooasaweikoknargedyeaste.

  We might tell ourselves that every sentence in a story should be beautiful, or finely wrought, or exquisitely detailed, or should present the reader with a new and brilliant figure of speech. But that first sentence—“This was the next time after what was supposed to be the last time”—taken on its own, out of context, might seem vague or confusing, and in a draft by a lesser writer, it would probably be followed by similarly abstract assertions. The combination of the abstract and the concrete, coupled with the deliberate release of contextualizing information, is what makes this writing strategic. In that first sentence, Nelson is not trying to find her way into the story—she’s creating questions she knows we’ll want answered.

  Simply omitting information doesn’t create a sense of mystery or tension (you don’t know my shoe size, but you don’t care). The reader needs to be made to want to know what’s being withheld or obscured. If the reader isn’t provoked to want to know more, the story has no forward momentum, no sense of urgency.

  Virtually no one is likely to find “Strike Anywhere” difficult to read. And that’s the point: even when it seems most accessible, good fiction is rich with minor complications, interruptions, suspensions—all of which serve to engage us and, perhaps perversely, increase our reading pleasure.

  A more complex example is Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Scheme of Things.” The story opens with a young man and a young woman who, we gradually learn, are going door to door to raise money, presumably for a charity. That scheme eventually leads them to the home of a generous older couple who takes them in and feeds them, and whom the two end up robbing in surprising and revealing ways. The young woman, Kirsten, has visions. She isn’t just perceptive; she sees things that aren’t visible to other people. Most significantly, she sees a young girl, talks to her, and offers to take her home, whereupon the girl runs off. Only several pages later do we find out that the girl has been dead for several years. While the story doesn’t use this word to describe her, the young girl Kirsten sees is a ghost.

  Here’s the writer’s problem: he doesn’t want to introduce the girl as a ghost. That would give away the surprise and, more important, distance us from Kirsten’s experience, since Kirsten thinks the girl is real. Neither does the writer want us to feel cheated when we learn the girl is a ghost. But the story is told in the omniscient third person. An omniscient narrator, by definition, knows everything. So the omniscient narrator knows the girl Kirsten sees is a ghost. If the omniscient narrator asserts that the girl is alive and then, several pages later, tells us she has been dead for years, there’s at least a chance we’ll start doubting all sorts of things the narrator tells us, and that the story will lose its authority.

  So: How to tell the reader the young girl is a ghost but not tell the reader the young girl is a ghost.

  As any lover of logic problems knows, the first step to solving one is to make sure you’ve defined it correctly. You remember the old story about the plane that crashed exactly on the Texas/Oklahoma border, and the legal dispute regarding which state the survivors should be buried in.34 The point of the joke is that we focus on a false problem. The question beginning “Which state . . .” begs one of two answers: Texas or Oklahoma. In that way, the joke is like a magic trick—say, the one where a magician asks a member of the audience to select a card and then, toward the end of the performance, the card is revealed in a sealed envelope, or a block of ice. The astonished/delighted/exasperated audience member asks, “How did he know what card I would choose?”—which is the wrong question.

  We often bang our heads against our laptops—or bang our laptops against our heads—because we’re focusing on the wrong problem. “I need to fix this ending!” we say to ourselves, when we know by now that any serious problem with an ending is almost certainly a problem that begins much earlier. We keep trying to bring a dead scene to life, only to realize the scene has no reason for being. Or, as in the case of “The Scheme of Things,” we think the problem is how to introduce a character, when in fact the problem is how to incorporate a specific incident into the larger aims of the story.

  Here’s how D’Ambrosio does it. The story begins with description of one of the two main characters:

  Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. . . . He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist.

  That first sentence—“Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed”—and especially the use of “vanished” and “utterly,” might suggest something of a magic trick. Lance didn’t simply open the door or go into the men’s room—he “vanished.” He didn’t just look different; he was “utterly changed.” The next sentence is a nice bit of sleight-of-hand, as D’Ambrosio tells us what Lance looked like earlier by telling us what’s missing: gone was the black hair, gone was the beard, and so on. That emphasis on what has disappeared makes ominous the otherwise simple statement, “He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist.” One thing we immediately understand: Lance is no evangelist. We suspect he is up to no good.

  Having established that possibility, the story introduces the other main character, Kirsten, and the boy at the service station who inspects their damaged car. In what might appear to be a throwaway gag, Lance assumes the boy’s name is Randy—the name on the oval patch above his shirt pocket—only to learn that it’s Bill. When the boy goes to get parts for a temporary repair, Lance sits on the hood and looks around. We see brown clouds of soil, dust on the leaves of a few dying elms, some trailers across the street, and then this:

  One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.
<
br />   On first reading, this arrangement of information feels like another deadpan joke. The narrator could have told us earlier that it was Halloween—that certainly would have given us a different context for Lance’s transformation. But it would have been a wasted gesture in the first paragraph, given the story’s purposes. Here are those plain and direct sentences again:

  One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

  Notice what the second sentence doesn’t say: “Three children, two dressed as Indians and one as a cowgirl, climbed down the wooden steps.” No, the omniscient third-person narrator asserts that what exits the trailer are “two Indians and a cowgirl.” Also absent: the word “costume.”

  So on the next page we accept the narrator’s assertion that when Kirsten, the other main character, walks toward the intersection, “ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases.” Not children dressed as ghosts and witches, not people in costumes.

  The narrator then rewards our close reading by adding to the motif: “The street lights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight. . . . The casual clothes that Lance had bought her in Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem like a costume and were now especially flimsy and ridiculous here in Tiffin, Iowa.” Lance vanishes and reappears, looking as bland as an evangelist; Indians and cowgirls and ghosts and witches walk the streets, but Kirsten feels as if her clothes are a costume.

  Subtext is beginning to take shape, but we have no way to see that the next lines are part of it: “A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her. She thought she might befriend the girl and take her home . . .”

  The interaction with the little girl transpires over the course of two pages; then there’s some other action; and so quite some time passes before we learn that the little girl Kirsten met was actually killed in an accident years ago.

  If there were no preparation for that revelation, the story would feel like a cheat. But from its very first sentence, the story has announced that people are not what they appear to be; and by introducing those two Indians and a cowgirl before we know it’s Halloween, the story has essentially telegraphed the illusion that’s about to follow. Rather than feel tricked, when we realize that the little girl was a ghost, we recognize that the narrator was telling us more than we could understand, withholding information but also drawing our attention to the very thing we should be looking at.

  When we learn the little girl had been killed in an accident years earlier, and when we realize those lines about the two Indians and a cowgirl that caught our attention were designed to catch our attention, for a reason we couldn’t have anticipated, we might feel something like glee. Our pleasure is not in being fooled, but in realizing that our careful attention has been anticipated and rewarded by the author. As a result, the solution to a problem that could have undermined the narrative’s authority instead enhances that authority; and as we continue reading, we are alert for other subtle clues the writing might offer.

  TUNING IN THE FLOW CHANNEL

  You come to these places and say to yourself, I can’t do this, I know I can’t do this, I’m certain I can’t do it, but I have to do it, I know I have to. You would give anything to be somewhere besides there, but there’s no use thinking about it. You have to go on. In the end it uplifts you somehow.

  — JAMES SALTER

  Even among gatherings of thoughtful readers and writers, there are a number of terms, like “narrative line,” that come up fairly often without being carefully defined or investigated. These terms are assumed to have meaning that everyone understands, even if no one bothers to explain exactly what that meaning might be.

  One of those terms is “flow.” It’s not uncommon for someone to say that a story, or a passage in a story, “flows.” This is meant as praise. But if someone asks, “What do you mean by flow?” the response is often either an awkward hemming and hawing or the classic, desperate, “You know what I mean.” What is it that we know? That fiction flows or doesn’t flow. Or it flows in places. In any case, to flow is good; not to flow is bad.

  My father, who sold industrial equipment designed to control and measure water and steam, knew what flow was and how to measure it. In that world, flow is a matter of volume, speed, and pressure, and is controlled by various valves and regulators. While that might seem far removed from writing, in the essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” David Jauss makes a strong case that, on the microlevel, syntax serves as a kind of regulator. While he offers no formula for achieving ideal flow in fiction, he suggests that varying syntax is key. On the macrolevel, he argues for variety in the length and structure of scenes. Interestingly, this suggests that smoothness, regularity, and uniformity—virtues when we try to control the flow of water through pipes—are not the methods or goals of aesthetic flow.

  Some insight into this apparently counterintuitive feature of effective flow in writing is offered by a Hungarian psychologist with the conversation-stopping name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as “the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” This could apply to reading, or presumably writing, but also to playing air hockey or slide guitar. It’s a state often discussed by the designers of video games and people who study them. To maintain “flow” is the ideal. If you’ve been around a teenager or teenager-at-heart who seems zoned out, comatose, except staring at a monitor with a controller in hand, he is, possibly, experiencing flow.

  Game designer and Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell discusses the “flow channel” in his book The Art of Game Design, which offers an interesting perspective on the creation of narratives. According to Schell, the four requirements necessary to put a game player—or, for our purposes, a reader—into the “flow state” are (1) clear goals, (2) no distractions, (3) direct feedback, and (4) continuous challenge. He discusses all of those, but our immediate interest is that last item: continuous challenge. “If we start to think we can’t achieve [the goal],” he writes, “we feel frustrated, and our minds start seeking an activity more likely to be rewarding. On the other hand, if the challenge is too easy, we feel bored, and again, our minds start seeking more rewarding activities.” So: challenging is good, easy is bad, too hard is too bad. Never mind, for the moment, how we measure degrees of challenge, ease, or difficulty in a poem or story. And we shouldn’t get our hopes up for an answer, because of course all those qualities are relative. What’s too easy for you is nearly impossible for me.

  Simply establishing a constant state of challenge turns out not to be effective for long. Instead, the ideal situation, flow-channel-wise, is to keep the game player or reader moving within a tolerable range of new challenge and acquired skill—or, as Csikszentmihalyi puts it, between anxiety and boredom.

  A child might be challenged by playing tic-tac-toe, for instance; but once someone learns how to win or force a draw every time, the game holds less interest. Books of sudoku and crossword puzzles are often labeled easy, medium, or hard because few people will pay for a book of puzzles they can’t do, and not many more will spend time with puzzles that are too simple. With a game like chess, new players might have trouble remembering how the different pieces move; after that, the level of difficulty changes with the opponents they play. Of course, all this varies with the individual. Some people get pleasure from winning all the time, some people might persist despite losing all the time, but most people will be stimulated by a cycle of success and failure, by ongoing challenges. The player moves from frustration, or anxiety, to satisfaction, or competency, then to a new level of frustration, and so on.

  This cycle of satisfaction and frustration is familiar to every writer. We write sentences or drafts that disappoint us, and we feel frustrated. But then a sentence or paragraph or image delights us, and that success encourages us to cont
inue. If we never felt pleasure from anything we wrote, we’d stop; but if we were completely satisfied, if we didn’t feel the urge to move beyond what we have accomplished or to take on a new challenge, we’d lose interest.

  Most serious poetry and fiction is unlike a game in that it doesn’t intend to become increasingly difficult, but it is like a game in that we want the reader to be engaged and to experience some combination of intrigue, delight, challenge, surprise, provocation, and satisfaction. The ideal reading experience might be comparable to that flow state. The books that give us the most pleasure, the deepest pleasure, combine uncertainty and satisfaction, tension and release.

  Schell says that the key to a successful game is to let players progress quickly to the point where they find themselves challenged, and to make sure that every significant success leads to an increase in difficulty. It isn’t enough for the story to be somewhere in between too hard and too easy; ideally, the story will provide the reader an ongoing series of challenges and satisfactions. If, on a hike, all we care about is convenient travel—the physical equivalent of reading a kitchen appliance manual—we’re happy to have big stepping stones, close together, and a quietly flowing stream.