There has never been a place swept as clear of accumulation and superstructure as ours. There's an opportunity here that doesn't come every century, for not every century has the room to be creative. There is the room and the opportunity, but nothing is moving in that way.
I'm not proposing right choices or wrong choices. I'm not even pushing transcendence over gosh-awful secularism. I'm saying that we do have choices and opportunities to the extent that nobody has ever had them before. There are fine building stones all around us, whatever ruins they are from. But nobody is building.
There's an old and much-quoted Housman verse:
“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made—”
—and there are stylized and self-serving ways of quoting this verse as though to justify oneself and disclaim any responsibility for the world. But this has become a crocodile verse now, for the world referred to isn't here any more. And the question to be asked of everyone is “If you are not right now making a world, why aren't you?” Group ingenuity, on an unconscious level at first perhaps, and then on a conscious level, can bring it about. It can be done by a small elite of only a few million geniuses. Declare yourself one of them! You can now set up your own rules for being a genius, and then you can be one. You can set up your own rules for being anything at all.
There will be, happily, a new world, a new civilization-culture to follow on the recent termination of the Structured Western World. All it's waiting for is ideas to germinate and a few sparks to kindle. Several of the survivor-groups of the old world-shipwreck have sparking machines, but they may not realize what they are.
But if we can't somehow bring about the sparking, the reanimation trick, then we're really dead.
“Forget that reanimation,” some of you say. “What's the matter with the way it is now?”
“Nobody's driving the contraption. That's one thing that's the matter with it.”
“That's all right too,” some say. ‘It isn't going anywhere. It isn't running. We've even taken the wheels off it. We like it that way.”
“But even the ruins we are grubbing in are sinking into a slough. We'll be drowned in foul muck if we don't start to move. It's up to our mouths now, and that is why we are babbling and bubbling. Soon it will be over our noses, and we can only hold our breaths for so long.”
“That's all right,” some still say. “We like the way it tickles our noses. Leave it the way it is.”
Well, that's our choice, but it isn't the only one.
Possibly, if we don't drown in the present muck, there will be a new world. As a condition to its coming into being, it will have its new arts, new ideas, new categories of thought, new happinesses. It may even have successors to the old musics and fictions and peak experiences and immediacies. It isn't easy to predict what it may be, but it may be no more difficult to build it than to predict it.
When was the last time that we had a world? What, judging by its bones and stones lying around, was it like? No, we can't reconstruct it the way it was. All we have is a wide-open opportunity to make something new. A couple of hundred people here, a couple of billion there, working with uneasy brilliance, may come up with a stunning and unpredicted creation. The best way to be in on a new movement or a new world is to be one of the inventors of it.
Here is the condition that prevails in our non-world right now. We are all of us characters in a Science Fiction Story named ‘The Day The After The World Ended’. Well, more likely it is an animated story or comic strip in which we find ourselves to be the characters. The continuity has now arrived at ‘crux point’, the make-or-break point where brilliant strokes are called for. Somehow the characters have been given the opportunity of determining what happens next, an opportunity that is absolutely unprecedented.
Meanwhile the calendar is stuck. It comes up ‘The Day After The World Ended’ day after day, year after year. These should be the Green Years. But unless you use an inflated way of appraising things, these last few decades have not been at all creative. And if nothing grows in the Green Years, what will grow in the dry?
People much less gifted than ourselves have invented worlds in the past and have set them to run for their five to fifteen centuries. But we do not make a move yet. There is a large silence occupying the present time. Is it the silence just before a great stirring and banging? Or is it a terminal silence?
Well, what does happen now?
Can't any of the characters in this ‘do-it-yourself’ Science Fiction story come up with any sort of next episode? Would it help to change the name of the story from ‘The Day After The World Ended’ to ‘First on a New Planet’?
Any character may take any liberty he wishes with this post-world story. It is a game without rules. But apparently he will not be able to climb clear out of the story.
I refrain from writing “The End” here. It must not end.
It's Down The Slippery Cellar Stairs
Fiction writing is one of the manual-mental construction trades in which one advances from apprentice to journeyman and to master. It is one of the trades that can be mastered by nearly anyone of sufficient interest and will. And it is one of the more pleasant of the trades. Its main difference from the other trades lies in the material it shapes being at the same time more fleshy and more ghostly than the material that a carpenter or a stone mason shapes. Like all the trades, it can be learned.
“Shriek, shriek!” from somebody over there. “Writing is something special. It can't be taught.”
No, in strict terms it can't be taught. But it can be learned, which is a slightly better thing. And, considering some of the guys who have become adept at the trade, we will say that it can be learned by almost anybody. It is always learned. Nobody is born knowing it.
Even here there may be exceptions. There was one youngster in an SF story who wrote some pretty good stories while still in the womb. This was a special case, however, and he was a quick learner. And he did learn the trade, and under confining circumstances: he wasn't conceived knowing it.
There isn't any institute or authority that is empowered to regulate, examine, or license fiction writers. There aren't any unions to which one must belong in order to work at the trade. They will come: but they're not here, fully armed, yet. There are rules for fictioning, but they aren't universally-accepted or consensus rules. One makes one's own rules, with great wariness and canniness, and he may change them on his own authority.
It takes whatever ability and disposition one can muster to write stories. It takes ideas. It takes proper tools. And it takes something for which it is difficult to find a good name. I will call it ‘Susceptibility to Infestation’. No, I didn't find a very good name for it, did I?
As to the ability and disposition, you remember the Dutch boy who was learning English but getting certain pairs of words mixed up. “How do you learn it so quickly?” people asked him. He winked and tapped his head with his finger. “Kidneys,” he said.
You mean brains?
Oh sure, possibly brains help. All the ornery organs help. Brains that can wander about and possibly be mistaken for kidneys. And agility of all the organs and secretors. Use all your brains, not just those in your head. Visceral brains, that's what you need. And that is what you already have if you can find them. And incongruity helps.
And where do you find the ideas? You just go down the slippery cellar stairs, and there will always be good ideas lying around on the dank floor down there. These are the slippery stairs down to the cellar of your own mind. Uncork a bottle of reverie from those on the rack there. Eavesdrop on your own subliminal thoughts and processes. They are loaded with good ideas and quirks and puzzles. Reach in boldly and take whatever you want. They all belong to you. In the real sense of your own unconscious and borderland consciousness you are always loaded with ideas.
Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to
be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.
The tools you work with are your own language and your own self. You already have the knack of manipulating them both, and it comes handier every time you use it. So you take the story stuff, the idea-nuclei from both inside and outside sources, and you shape it into any sort of story you wish.
How about the requirements, as that a story shall have a beginning and a middle and an end? No, that's just a phrase that editors use sometimes. There was one of them who so loved the phrase that he extended it and declared that a wife should have a beginning and a middle and an end. It made more sense when applied to a wife than when applied to a story, but only a very little more. And it was one of the things that ended him with his wife. A story must be a living entity. Even a living story will be a living segment. And living things don't have beginnings and middles and ends, not in the topographic sense.
That's about all of it.
The good stories, of course, write themselves.
And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds. There are stumblers, there are strident screamers, there are righteous drones. A lot of them write passable stuff a lot of the time. But the number of really good writers is always an irrational number less than one.
Now here's the oddity: there aren't any really good writers, but there are a number of really good stories. The really good stories don't run to a high proportion of the total stories, and yet there are very many of them. The way that really good stories come about, without really good writers, is by a device that I had trouble naming a while ago.
Good stories are independent persons and beings. And a good story will get itself born or written no matter what sort of host it must infest in whatever form of symbiosis is needed to get it done. People talk a lot about ‘possession’ lately, of possession by devils, or anyhow by quirky spirits. There are two similar states they seldom talk about, and these are ‘obsession’ and ‘infestation’. All three of these are old technical terms.
I believe that the case of a story (which is a living entity on some level or other), taking limited control of a writing person for purposes of transmission, may be a genuine case of infestation. There is a spirit or ghost contact, or whatever name your orientation allows you to give it. Oh sure, this is a real spirit manifestation, much more real than any of the séance stuff. It is a ghost-form superior story reaching for a tool to get itself written. It is this process that many persons who are not really good writers (I am writing from personal experience) do sometimes write very good stories, or are the instruments for them being written. I have called this means or quality ‘Susceptibility to Infestation’. Quite a few writers have this susceptibility. I haven't found a very good name for the thing. Maybe you will be able to.
And so, with the fiction-building, the sky is the limit, or else the top of your head, whichever comes first.
There is a constriction or limit that traps you. All the writing juices must go through the arteries and capillaries and veins of the brains. All the juices must go through the nerve fibers of the brain-stem. All the juices must go through translations into electrical impulses and chemical fixes. And things in the brain become constricted with the years. The blood doesn't flow there as richly as it used to, and the ideas don't. And the special things wear thin and hide away.
What is lost after a while is exuberance, it is spontaneity, it is originality, it is the quick enjoyment and apperception. Oh, these things come back sometimes, for long or short visits. But it isn't the same thing as if they always lived with you.
It is for this reason that fiction writing is mostly for young people. They have a built-in advantage that only time can take away from them. The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today. By tomorrow you may have lost something.
Shape Of The S.F. Story
The writer sure does like that sub-title. Would it be possible to print it in letters of flame?
The shape of the Science Fiction Story, which is also the shape of many other stories, is trilobite (the same as the extinct marine arthropod of the Paleozoic that bears this name): it has three lobes or segments or parts. These are sometimes called, inexactly, the beginning, the middle, and the end. They are also called the scent or the sighting, the pursuit or courtship or joined battle, and the killing or the conquest. The three parts, for a long while, hold good for all stories except one. This was accepted as the only shape for a story or feat. Very many persons still make everything in their lives fit this shape. This is known as ‘Making a Big Thing About Everything.’
The shape always fit beautifully those three great originals, the hunt story, the battle story, and the carnal encounter story. (A vulgar friend calls these the stories of the prey, the fray, and the lay.) The second part of the third story has been especially prominent and has come to contain almost all narrative and presentation within itself. Most of the arts and musics and literatures are no more than devices of that second segment of the third story, the pursuit or courtship aspect of the carnal encounter story. It has served well; but it has monopolized, and it has overshadowed possible new growth.
The beginning of a story, the scent or sighting, the interest hook, the personal hook, the posing of the problem, the uttering of the challenge, the tallyho at first raising of the fox, the news of the murder or the discovery of the corpse, the report of the disappearing colonists on Wallenda World, the moth-ghost first presence of ‘The She’, the cuteness of opening contrivance, these things can be adapted to fit anything. The beginning is the most flexible part of any story, an open-ended and floating arrangement, a proof that it is not a literal beginning with one end made fast.
The middle of the story, the hunt, the pursuit, the trap-setting, the battle of wits or of weapons, the planning and implementation, the resounding assaults or the silent ambushes and assassinations, the campaigns and courtships and ritual rapings, the quests and travelings, the counters and clevernesses, may be spread to cover almost all sorts of lives and situations from the primordial to the ultra-modern. (Only the dreary middle-modern cannot be fitted to it.)
And the end of the story, the killing or the conquest or the blow-up, the dramatic resolution, the culmination, the climax, the orchestration of effects, it almost always (from long practice) has the right tone and pace and emphasis.
This three-segment thing is the classic shape, the shape as it should be. It is even the shape of most histories and eruptions and thunder-storms and ocean waves. But the shape doesn't hold irrevocably for all nature. It holds most strongly for the doings of humankind. Only human people have the jerky nervousness that seems to require such a framework. Only people have the sharp focus (or constraining narrowness) that permits itself to be fitted into the box with no vital pieces hanging out. Only people seem willing to limit themselves to several very similar fields within tight fences. A cow that is grazing cow-deep in lush alfalfa may stretch its neck through a fence till it is bloodied by the barbed wire, and will extend its tongue amazingly to take one dusty and puny pig-weed from the roadside. It does this just to be difficult or different. But people seldom have such a spirit of contrary adventure.
As to any rules for the shape or sequence of songs or plays or stories, someone will finally ask: Who says that these are the rules? How about the three dramatic unities of Time and Place and Whatever is the third? Who said that they must apply?
Aristotle said it, that's who. Oh, him.
But how about the law that a story must have a scent or initial presentation, a pursuit or battle or courtship, and a killing or conquest or blow-up (these things commonly called, for purposes of deception, a beginning, a middle, and an end), who says that this law must apply?
There is a r
umble (part of that rumble is a hundred thousand years long) and it grows into a roar. A rampant host is coming, on foot and in armor-clads, on onagers and dragons and sea-stallions and thunder-colts and trilobite monsters and BEMs, in ram-jets and rockets and in the cockpits of futuristic desks and stereotype machines, in winged jack-boots and Mercury-sandals. This host has spears and blasters, cross-bows and brass cannons, bloody swords and atomic pellet-pistols. “We say it must apply, that's who!” they thunder. And about all that one can answer is “Oh, all right then.”
For these are the heroes laying down the rules for their own accounts. The shape and resolution of the Science Fiction Story most especially, and of most human stories, is heroic. It is Homeric, Howardian, and Heinleinlich Heroic, and there is a hundred thousand year long parade of heroes to reinforce the form and shape.
The hero, of course, has never been very venturesome. He sticks to proven roads, and he acts all his parts out between the chalk lines that mark off that discrete area that is named ‘Center Stage’. That's as it should be. ‘Center Stage’ is the right place to be heroic. But it is this heroic and central authority that insists that the story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Well, if the hairy heroes defend it, what shall we find amiss with it? Not much. Hardly anything is wrong with it; hardly ever does it fail to cover. It is better than most shapes, most times, most places. Why sprain your neck to take a dusty, saw-toothed, sour pig-weed from outside the fence when you are in the middle of the lush greenery inside.
It's very limiting, if that is an objection. The shape is that of the inside of a box. It's an indoors thing, and it does not recognize that there might be any outside anywhere. It believes itself to be universal, and it isn't.
But isn't it a pretty big box? Yes, it is. And isn't a big box almost the same thing as universal, if it is big enough? Yes, it is; it's almost the same thing. It's the almost perfect shape, and it's pretty big. And yet there are a few small things missing from that almost perfect shape.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 7