Writers aspire toward the unreachable—perfection. All creative people do. Whatever the expression, all you can see is what’s not working. The mistakes are gigantic in your eyes; the successes miniscule.
But perfection isn’t possible. The universe isn’t set up to allow perfection. It’s an idea, not a fact.
And down here on planet Earth, the job is even harder. The English language is a rickety Rube Goldberg assembly of hastily made-up neolinguistic-confabustructulations, unbalanced grammar, archaic root forms, inelegant constructions, inbred phrases, misread Latin, misunderstood scientific terms, flatulent psychobabble, inconsistent spelling, and uncategorizable bits and pieces appropriated from any unwary language that passed too close to a desperate writer.
No. Perfection is out of the question. The best one can achieve is excellence—but excellence is sufficient, because it puts your focus on the accomplishment, not the ideal.
There’s an old saying. “When you are ready to learn, the universe will provide a teacher.” Hell—even when you aren’t ready to learn, the universe will provide teachers. It’s your job to wake up and listen.
But it’s even worse than that. The whole universe is a lesson. Every human being on the planet is a good example—okay, some of them are good examples of bad examples, but the point still holds. If you’re not learning something new every day, then lie down in a hole and let them cover you with dirt, you’re done.
Here’s the point—at least, here’s how I see it—if you’re a writer, the single best place to learn, the single best example on the planet, is the one sitting in your own chair.
If you—the person whose fingers are poised above the keyboard—are capable of any degree of self-awareness, if you can catch even an occasional glimmer of what goes on inside that chaotic mass of meat churning behind your eyes, then you’ve got a wealth of source material that will never run out. (The first draft of this sentence had a lot of his/her constructions. Too unwieldy. Sorry about the patriarchal inheritance of the language. Language is not designed for accuracy. It’s the worst possible tool for specific communication that human beings have ever invented—but it’s the only tool we have. Deal with it.)
Writers write to solidify their thoughts. Getting it down on paper—or at least onto the glowing phosphors of the monitor—codifies it, lets you step back, lets you take a second look, lets you see what your thought looks like, let’s you reexamine it, gives you the opportunity for detached observation of the self.
Here’s the obligatory disclaimer: As much as I champion self-awareness as the author’s greatest tool, the hard uncomfortable truth is that self-awareness is not always insight—sometimes, it’s just another delusional construction. Real self-awareness is rooted in honesty. Yes, you do have a wart. Cherish it.
Looking at your own words lets you see if you’re being a generous contributor to the people around you or just another self-righteous asshole filling a metaphorical diaper.
Which is why every story has to be seen as a learning experience. Sometimes you learn what works. Sometimes you learn what doesn’t. But mostly, you learn that the road to quality is paved with a million words. You learn to recognize your own mistakes. After a while, you start to see them even before you make them. You learn to find better ways to phrase a thought or a description or a piece of dialog. And best of all, eventually you get lazy enough to sacrifice purple for precision—that’s when you finally achieve the real goal of any wordsmith: readability.
Most of the stories in this book were experiments. Oh hell, everything I write is an experiment. The blank page, the blank screen, it all starts with the same realization: I’ve never written this story before, I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t know how it will turn out, and if some publisher somewhere is desperate enough to pay me for the privilege of publishing it, I’ll count that as a success just as soon as the check clears the bank.
At the beginning of my career, it was my belief—now it’s a conviction, based on evidence—that a writer should not take himself seriously until he has written at least a million words. This is the “muscle memory” argument. Cue Mr. Miyagi. “Wax on, wax off. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t forget to breathe, breathing is good.” Ten thousand hours of anything creates muscle memory.
The stories in this book were all written during my “learning period.” Also known as my “bleak period.” The post-sixties. That time of my life when I was discovering my ability to be truly depressed. (Not without good reason, but apparently anguish is a necessary part of the process. Do writers have to learn how to suffer before they’re worth reading? Nobody said anything about that on Career Day.)
Two of the stories in this book are terrible. At least, in my opinion, they are. I’m embarrassed to have written them. (I’ll point them out as we go; they’re included for completeness.) But even terrible stories are part of the learning process. There are also several stories in this collection that I am still very proud of—if not for the execution, then certainly for the ambition.
Writers worth reading do not spring full blown from their own foreheads like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. They start out as voracious readers, devouring every book in their path. After a thousand or so books and stories, maybe ten thousand in the case of slow learners, you start to notice the difference between a fun read and a tiresome one. (I will not name the author who so consistently disappointed me in my teens that I began to associate his name with books-worthy-of-being-skipped. He is mostly forgotten today, but I’m grateful for his existence. He became my personal good example of how not to write.)
I think that’s the critical lesson.
When you can tell the difference between effective and clumsy in others, then you can start to see it in your own work. If you’re too damn stubborn to quit, you start to learn how to rewrite.
I had one advantage—a slight case of OCD. I wanted every page to have a perfect appearance. No erasures, no strikeouts, no penciled-in additions, no half pages. I wanted the whole manuscript to be spotless. I wanted accurate punctuation and flawless grammar. I wanted precise black type on a pristine white surface. I wanted perfect margins and accurate page numbering. I wanted my manuscripts to be easy to read. I wanted them to be professional.
Other teenagers bought cars. I bought a typewriter. But what a typewriter!—a fabled ecstasy of a machine, from the kingdom of electrical magic, a desktop sports car, easily capable of 120 words per minute on the straightaway. An IBM Selectric! The keyboard had a sublime chaketa-chaketa-click that was the mechanical equivalent of an orgasm. Above, an infuriated golf-ball raced back and forth across the page, leaving a crisp trail of words on the clean white paper, looking as if they had been professionally printed. That pristine clarity demanded respect—it demanded equal precision in the language. It demanded eloquence.
There was an actual physical joy in the clickety-clickety-clack of the keys on that anvil-heavy machine, feeling the words occur in real time. Sometimes I typed for the sheer joy of typing, not knowing where the words were leading, finding out where I had arrived only when the journey ended. It was like conducting a personal orchestra. Sometimes, caught up in the magic of the moment—with Beethoven or the Beatles filling the room—I felt as if I was playing a joyous blues-riff on an infinite piano. (Additional purple prose removed here.)
So if a page needed correction, retyping wasn’t a chore.
I’d retype a whole page just to fix one broken sentence. I’d go back and retype ten pages if necessary, repairing an awkward paragraph and then fixing everything that followed so I would have only clean pages—and every time I retyped, I rewrote. I would see what was missing and I’d add it. I’d see what was unnecessary and I’d cut it. I’d see what was clumsy and I’d change it. I’d see where thoughts were out of order and move whole paragraphs, whole sections. And sometimes I’d even see what was effective—and I’d leave it alone.
That little bit of OCD compelled me to learn, forced me to reexamine every sentence
more than once, pushed me toward a better understanding of the limits of language as well as its power to evoke.
Today, I use a computer. (I know a few authors who don’t.) But all these years later, I still miss the clickety-clackety-clatter of the Selectric. It made typing a physically satisfying experience, but I don’t miss having to retype multiple pages to achieve a handsome-looking manuscript. The computer easily generates better pages than I could ever do by hand.
But the ease with which the computer allows a person to pour words onto the screen is also a trap. A quick stroll through the comment section on any web page reveals how little thought exists between the final exclamation point and the SEND button.
Good writing rarely occurs in the first draft—great books aren’t written; they’re rewritten. That the words look good on the page doesn’t guarantee they’re worth reading. The Selectric taught me that. Removing the need to retype a sloppy page can also deny the writer the mandate, the opportunity, the possibility of learning from the second look, the third, and the fourth as well.
Learning to pay attention to the words, the sentences, the paragraphs—that personal self-awareness of the linguistic decision—that, I think, is the skill that good writers ultimately achieve and consistently demonstrate. It is what the skilled writer aspires to accomplish every time he sits down at the keyboard.
It is also a possibility that the computer can encourage. A good word processing program lets you skip easily through your text, lets you find occurrences of words and phrases, lets you revisit your work as many times as necessary. It’s no longer a stack of finished pages—regardless of the length, the totality remains a work in progress until you hit the PRINT button. (In fact, you may never hit the PRINT button at all. A lot of text never hits paper until several editors have gone over it and the publisher hits the PRINT button.)
See, here’s the thing. Writing can’t be taught—it can only be learned. And it can only be learned by paying attention to what you write—by watching not only the words on the page, but the person who’s typing them, looking to see where all those strange thoughts and uncomfortable experiences are coming from, and ultimately learning how to tap into that far-deeper source that fuels the passion.
The learning process isn’t linear—it’s a series of plateaus, a punctuated equilibrium of personal evolution. A writer’s chronological history isn’t a journey as much as it’s a vertical cross section of his or her life. Like the rings of a tree, it’s a measure of growth and pause, fertility and patience.
This book is one of the rings of my life.
Looking back from this perspective, it’s clear that most of these stories are about relationships—mostly about how they break down. And that too is an accurate reflection of the time and the author.
Later on, however—
But that’s a different collection.
—David Gerrold
With a Finger in My I
For the record, I was not doing drugs before, during, or after I wrote this story.
It started as a dream—I dreamt I was looking in a mirror. I saw no pupil in my left eye. Or was it my right? Hard to tell. The mirror reversed everything.
When I woke up, the dream was still with me, so I sat down at my desk and started typing.
It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t even half a story. It had no meaning at all. It was just a stream of vaguely connected sentences where everything was taken so literally that all sense disappeared.
Then about six pages in, I got to a point where I didn’t know what came next, so I put it in the drawer and forgot about it.
A year or two later, Harlan Ellison began assembling stories for Again, Dangerous Visions, a sequel to his landmark anthology, Dangerous Visions. He rejected the one I thought he should buy (more about that later), so I dug out my weird little dream and added a Lewis Carroll ending to it.
He bought it. This is it.
When I looked in the mirror this morning, the pupil was gone from my left eye. Most of the iris had disappeared too. There was just a blank white area and a greasy smudge to indicate where the iris had previously been.
At first I thought it had something to do with the contact lenses, but then I realized that I don’t wear lenses. I never have.
It looked kind of odd, that one blank eye staring back at me, but the unsettling thing about it was that I could still see out of it. When I put my hand over my good right eye, I found that the eyesight in my left was as good as ever, and it concerned me.
If I hadn’t been able to see out of it, I wouldn’t have worried. It would have meant only that during the night I had gone blind in that eye. But for the pupil of the eye to just fade away without affecting my sight at all—well, it bothered me. It could be a symptom of something serious.
Of course, I thought about calling the doctor, but I didn’t know any doctors, and I felt a little bit embarrassed about troubling a perfect stranger with my problems. But there was that eye and it kept staring at me, so finally I went looking for the phone book.
Only, the phone book seemed to have disappeared during the night. I had been using it to prop up one end of the bookshelf, and now it was gone. So was the bookshelf—I began to wonder if perhaps I had been robbed.
First my eye, then the phone book, now my bookshelf had all disappeared. If it had not been that today was Tuesday, I should have been worried. In fact, I was already worried, but Tuesday is my day to ponder all the might-have-beens that had become never-wases. Monday is my day to worry about personal effects (such as eyes and phone books) and Monday would not be back for six days. I was throwing myself off schedule by worrying on a Tuesday. When Monday returned, then I would worry about the phone book, if I didn’t have something else of a more pressing nature to worry about first.
(I find that pigeonholing my worrying like that helps me to keep an orderly mind—by allotting only so much time to each problem I am able to keep the world in its proper perspective.) But there was still the matter of the eye, and that was upsetting me. Moreover, it was distorting my perspective.
I resolved to do something about it immediately. I set out in search of the phone, but somewhere along the way that too had disappeared, so I was forced to abandon that exploration.
It was very frustrating—this distressing habit of disappearing that the inanimate objects had picked up. Every time I started to look for something, I found that it had vanished, as if daring me to find it. It was like playing hide-and-go-seek, and since I had long ago given up such childish pastimes, I resolved not to encourage them any further and refused to look for them anymore. (Let them come to me.)
I decided that I would walk to the doctor. (I would have put on my cap, but that would have meant looking for it, and I was afraid that it too would have disappeared by the time I found it.)
Once outside, I noticed that people were staring at me in a strange way as they passed. I realized that it must be my eye. I had forgotten about it, not realizing that it might look a bit strange to others.
I started to turn around to go back for my sunglasses, but I knew that if I started to look for them, they too would surely disappear. So I turned around and headed once again for the doctor’s.
“Let them come to me,” I muttered, thinking of the sunglasses. I must have startled the old lady I was passing at the time because she turned to stare at me in a most peculiar manner.
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and pushed onward. Almost immediately I felt something hard and flat in my left-hand pocket. It was my sunglasses in their case. They had indeed come to me. It was rewarding to see that I was still the master of the inanimate objects in my life.
I took the glasses out and put them on, only to find that the left lens of the glasses had faded to a milky white. It matched my eye perfectly, but I found that, unlike my eye, I was quite unable to see through the opaqued lens. I would just have to ignore the stares of passersby and proceed directly on to the doctor’s office.
After a bit, howev
er, I realized that I did not know where I was going—as I noted earlier, I did not know any doctors. And I most certainly knew that if I started to search for the office of one, I would probably never find if at all. So I stood on the sidewalk and muttered to myself, “Let them come to me.”
I must confess that I was a little bit leery of this procedure—remembering what had happened with the sunglasses—but in truth, I had no alternative. When I turned around, I saw a sign on the building behind me. It said, “Medical Center.” So I went in.
I walked up to the receptionist, and I looked at her. She looked at me. She looked me right in the eye (the left one) and said, “Yes, what can we do for you?”
I said, “I would like to see a doctor.”
“Certainly,” she said. “There goes one down the hall now. If you look quickly, you can catch a glimpse of him. See! There he goes!”
I looked and she was right—there was a doctor going down the hall. I could see him myself. I knew he was a doctor because he was wearing golf shoes and a sweater; then he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. I turned back to the girl. “That wasn’t exactly what I meant, I said.
“Well, what was it you meant?”
I said, “I would like for a doctor to look at me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“I thought I did,” I said, but very softly.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “And speak up. I can hardly hear you.” She picked up her microphone and spoke into it. “Dr. Gibbon, puh-lease come to reception….” Then she put down her microphone and looked at me expectantly.
In the Deadlands Page 2