Writing from the Inside Out (11 page)

In putting words down on the page, language moves from the realm of the imagination and acquires a body. The words become a piece — a collection of signs and sounds that has accrued shape in the mind of the listener. I picture grape vines growing on a trellis. Given time and a bit of training, the grape vines will add to the structure, and they will strain it. I might feel that they work against it, although that is not their intention. The intent of words and vines is to live and grow with blind faith. I prioritize language's capacity for emergence, and am at the service of its wanton meandering. My primary focus is to guide and utilize supportive structure in service of what wants to arise. Language's vines are trained and coaxed to grow in the way that best serves the drinker of wine.

This model of literary structure is at play in the world as well. Society's gridded structure is most sane in the service of nature. Solar panels are a prime example of this dynamic. I could wander up and down mountain trails as much as I want — I won't come across a solar panel that has naturally grown out of the ground or has been cast down from the limb of a tree like a pinecone. The supportive structure of industrial society makes this construction possible. Choosing to structure my life in service of nature brings me to live in a cabin in the woods with an array of solar panels, benefitting from our ability to direct the supportive structure of industry and technology to serve the wider net of interconnected life.

In much the same way that we see the aimlessness of urban development, we would do well to remember that a supportive structure is not superior simply because it is load bearing. Cities are not better than wilderness. Each is as it is. All the while, life arises within and without structure, in the quality of light on the cabin's beams, in the characteristics of its wood grain, and in the moisture, fungus, and heat of erosion. I am at the command of living structures whether I know it or not.

The world has many examples of urban sprawl — supportive structures, to be sure, but the kind of organization that is not at the behest of a beautiful aim. It is not for everyone to till the soil, and it is not for every storyteller to be a poet-monk. Yet it does behoove me to be sensitive to where my food comes from and where the life in my language is.

In my view, there are two structural models:

Supportive structure: rhythmic, boundaried, dealing with the crystalline stability of images and themes, central characters and grounded details.

Musical structure: lyric, dealing with intuitive progression and a sense of flow

When a scene winds tantalizingly on and on, I would say that the musical structure is dominant. The listener reacts to the music of the written word. When, on the other hand, a scene demonstrates a sturdy scaffold of organization, such as dated entries in a logbook, supportive structure is dominant. These structures are overlapping notions— whether we perceive one or the other in a work is largely intuitive.

Amid both of these structures is what arises from the work itself, its poetry, the living flame, the self-organized, the emergent. Emergence is apt to occur in any structure, but most openly when the writer's approach welcomes uncertainty.

Musical structure deals with the organization of sound and resonance through time. Rolling a boulder down a hill creates noise but not music because it has not found organization. The initial impulse was triggered, and after that the boulder entered the percussive realm of natural sound — which is simply what happens when a boulder rolls downhill. At first it is active, then it becomes passive. If, instead, I had placed many boulders along a high ridge and dropped them off in a regular or ordered sequence — say, one boulder every two seconds, the resulting sound would create more total noise, but also potentially something more musical, because there has been more association. The boulders would strike against the same contours as they made their way down the hillside, and the listening brain would perceive some music because there is some intention toward association.

In writing dialogue, one experiences a musical progression; it feels right or it doesn't — I react to it, expecting the kind of flow that happens naturally when bodies relate through dialogue.

Breath follows a musical structure. Its depth and tempo and volume closely match my state of arousal. Talking and moaning and hiccupping are upsets in the conformity of breath's musical structure.

Musical structure exists in character development and interactions across time. Motifs and guiding imagery flesh out the supportive structure and coax the reader's hand across the story's body. The majority of fictive works consists of musical elements.

The flow of writing can rely on our felt understanding of music to learn how it propels forward. In listening to the progression of chords, one hears the sounding of two notes lean forward in anticipation of a third note to complete the triad. The structure of music is available in the natural world, but it doesn't always manifest as such without the effort of the composer to structure the sounds so that they convey harmony and discord as the piece of music desires to express them.

Things want to recur, but I will always find them different. I will change, the image will change, and through it all, music may happen. I plant several lemon trees in large clay pots along a path to a formal garden. Each morning, I walk down the path to go to work in the garden. I see the same trees every day; with each day, I have a day's worth of experience; I grow older, and at least a little bit different. The trees are qualitatively different as well. It is early spring; the trees grow. They later bloom and fill the area with fragrance. Small buds form and, from the buds, fruit will grow. Bees and insects frequent the lemon trees; the leaves move in the wind. Each night the pores of the leaves open, and they respire. In bright sun, the color of the leaves is affected; chemically, they are at work with photosynthesis. If the mind is our sixth sense, perhaps the sense of time is the seventh sense. Somehow, we sense that time is passing, perhaps perceiving the constant of time through our varying interactions with it in states of arousal.

In music, an interval is a combination of notes. The notes may be sounded at the same time, or there may be time between them. We respond to the frequencies within the note and especially we respond to ratios between the sounded frequencies. A chord may sound comforting, or peculiar, or, as is true in Balinese gamelan, there are evil intervals. In writing, I find examples of intervals at play. When there are two scenes, what links them, what separates them, and what are the dimensions of the emotional/energetic bridge between them?

When we see one scene, we may expect another particular scene to follow it. When there is a wedding, we expect a honeymoon. A story that consistently adheres to such expectations feels flat, because its music blends into the background of our expectations. If, instead, we revise a formulaic interval to what might feel like an octave of difference — raised or lowered stakes — we impel the listener to react differently. There is a double honeymoon. One honeymoon has the voice of a tuba; the other, the texture of a vibraphone. I begin with an intention — and the form isn't known until I follow the approach dictated by my ear for music.

Supportive structure works because it offers a system in which the work as a whole shows its independence. Think of the graph drawing of a plot arc. Recall the historical details in
War and Peace.
Think of telling a friend a joke, then explaining to her a meandering bit of backstory to help qualify why the joke is funny. The history textbook from my middle school years forms a system of self-governing chapters that make sense even when removed from the rest of the book's context. One could open up the book and begin to read about pre-Columbian North America, and it would make sense because the book's structure offers discrete sections.

Supportive structure is also hierarchical. When there is a hierarchical book, within that book are parts, each of which has sections or chapters. Each chapter, in turn, may have headings and subheadings.

Supportive structure is often networked, as in an encyclopedia or dictionary. A friend of mine and I once spent a good couple of hours exploring the ways words are related through the network of a dictionary. I recorded this effort and developed a kind of spoken word album from it. We began with a word, read the definition, and chose a word from within the definition. We then read that word's definition, and kept on going that way.

Supportive structure is often latticed, where images are stitched or woven together in an overlay for the reader to explore. More than being overly guided, the reading experience is organically encouraging. Plot level concerns interweave. Let's say the main character, a boy, searches for the lock that fits the key that he finds in a blue vase on the highest shelf of his deceased father's closet. That is his plot, but it is not solely his story. Things that other characters want alter the boy's quest and decentralize it from the main storyline. Historical information comes into play, following a latticework of narrative, expository, and imagistic threads.

 

 

A piece of writing can have any sort of body — the key is for it to breathe. Poetry's domain is this crackling realm of association. What to do with images that do not prod the reader forward? These images emerge as life moves through the written form. Emergence frees an image of projections.

The morning of the day I married my wife, I went for a walk through the woods of Tuscany. I didn't follow a path. I came to a wild boar trail, and I followed it, passing mile marker stones measuring the distance from Siena. Parts of the trail were overgrown with tree limbs — too low for a person, but plenty of headroom for a family of boar. There was no path, let alone a main road — it had been hundreds of years since the road from Siena had come this way. I thought about how the boar had kept the path long after the highway had been diverted for flatter ground. There were squarely hewn white marble building stones but no structure anymore. I was in a valley — I slipped and tiptoed along a relatively slick path through the wash of mud from an uncommonly rainy spring. Several locals had been consoling my wife (in case our wedding day would be a rainy one) with a phrase of good fortune, something to the effect of “a wet bride is a lucky bride.” The day began partly cloudy, but by noon, the sky cleared, and our wedding, out on a hilltop, was beautiful. White cows mooed in the distance.

Objects hold a charge when I am attentive to them as part of the life of the work. Decorative elements gain texture, details, shadows within shadows. This type of communication is essential, yet nonfunctional. Like being beside a flickering fire, poetry rewards the listener's openness to the experience of wonder. Poetry is the way language lives. A work is most alive when unselfconscious, feeling to be unshaped by aim and, instead, magical, discovered, reported as-is.