One True Sentence

 I recently read a report from someone who'd seen a indigo bunting. I never have and I wonder if I ever will. My thoughts trailed off into our poor air quality and growing water problems, starving children and drone warfare, and I wonder, have we all grown too numb to care?

Here in Michigan, for the past two summers we have been under frequest air quality alerts due to wildfires in Canada. Because of drought and heat, these promise to continue and worsen. We grow numb to the gunmetal skies and the misty fog that isn't normal. 

(The Mighty Mac shrouded in smoke)

Four days ago I was outside and noticed that the sky was clear blue, crystal clean to the horizon, and a light bulb went off. This is what it's supposed to look like. That quickly my brain had accepted the gray pollutant-laden air as normal. We are an adaptable species. We adapt to polluted waters, floating fish, and reports of starving children without hearing any of it. We resort to the comfort of word puzzles on our phones and numbing television, the literal burying-of-heads in the sand and hope someone else will make it all better. Slap a Band-Aid on it.

I'm struggling with a work in progress centering around amphibian loss in a polluted world, a world that needs help but those with deep pockets don't care. I'm not a Rom-Com writer. I can't write fantasy, or comic. I think of the  Hemmingway quote "Write one true sentence". That's harder than it sounds. Slow down, think, and write one true thing. It could take all day. A week. But, as Jim Harrison said "Good art doesn't specialize in cheap solutions." Couldn't the same be said for good air? Good water? Good schools and good health?

I think of all the trees I've planted without acknowledging the fact that I will never see them grow to their fullest beauty, never sit under their shade,  but maybe my children will. Maybe a small niece or nephew will. Maybe that's an iota of compensation for not leaving the world better than how we found it. 

But back to this manuscript where I'm stuck on page 216. What do I do with these people? How do I make a reader care? I go back to my opening sentence and change it every time. Self-doubt creeps in like an imp on the stairs. Today I will stay off page 1 and work on page 217. 

Shock-Resistant Shit Detector

Do you engage your S.R.S.T. when you sit down to read a novel? Do you slip it into high gear when you're writing one? Are you empathetic and compulsive and fascinated by words?

This much I know: nothing else gets done when I'm caught up in the make-believe world of my novel. The greenhouse is a mess. There's a knee-high thistle in my hosta bed, cobwebs on the porch, cukes and tomatoes going to hell on the vine, garlic that needs to be sorted and stored in a cool dark place. These things bug me but here I sit with novel #2 spread out around me with pencil edits and crossed-out chapter breaks, unable to care about anything as much as I do it.

All I can think about is Boyd and his dangerous attraction to the migrant worker's daughter and why would he hide a gun there and a body here? What was he thinking? And why doesn't the ground stay frozen like it used to and the ice thicken on the lake enough to walk out safely on? Why do the creeps always have the upper hand? Why does his co-progatonist cut her hair to change her appearance and run away instead of standing up for herself and for him? Why do I care more about this than the weeds in my own life? Is this what John Gardner, teacher and writer, means by creating a vivid and continuous dream? Our own lives become a shambles as the dream on the page takes shape? Or is this the trance our readers are supposed to fall into, not us?

There are so many solutions to the problems our characters get into. As Gardner says, "Problems in novels are unlike problems in algebra which have one solution." Likewise, there's only one thistle to be pulled, and a set number of garlic to store, and one greenhouse to tend to, and I can knock the cobweb down with a broom. These things are easy and have one solution. A novel has any number of solutions, but, alas, I fear only one will be good enough. Only one will be brilliant.

A writer must have what Hemingway called the "built-in shock-resistant shit detector." In concert with the writer’s eye, (the ability to see how things really are and to write it down without falsification) and the appetite for compulsive revision—killing your darlings with a heightened intuition for the silly and the abstract—is the writer’s “special intelligence”.

We have to keep at it with daemonic compulsiveness until we can say, "It's as good as I can make it." And that will be good enough. Trust your unconscious. As Gardner says, "The unconscious is smart."

The pages are piled around me, numbered and full. The hum of the refrigerator is the only sound, and the sun colors the eastern sky like autumn sedum. I imagine these literary sages standing guard, daring me to try.