A Novel Should Break Your Heart

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart. – Susan Sontag 1933-2004

I’ve often wondered if I could write such a story. I have a hate/love relationship with sad endings. Should I challenge myself to write one? Would it make a masterpiece out of a cheesy, happily-ever-after? Have you written a story that Sontag would approve of? One that breaks your heart?

 As writers, should we be purveyors of escape at the end of the day?  Dealing out lighthearted romps, whodonits with neat endings, and happily-ever-afters, floating comfortably above controversy and reality? Or should we be shining a light into the dark corners of human existence and misfortune? There is no harder profession than writing and no higher calling than to tell the truth as we see it. But what is truth and do people want to read it? I don't want or even expect a happy ending, but I want a satisfying one.

Atonement (remember that one?) broke my heart. (I hated it!) Cormac McCarthy breaks my heart every time, yet I return to his stories again and again. I’m a glutton for tragedy, so why can’t I write one?  I fear it’s a flaw, the sign of an immature writer. And while it’s true, that I hate novels with sad endings, those are the ones that stick with me, the ones I can’t forget. So I wonder…do I have it in me to write the only story that seems worth writing? I fear it would break my heart.

The Torturer's Horse Scratches It's Innocent Behind

The torturer’s horse scratches it’s innocent behind on a tree….The old masters: how well they understood the human position: how it takes place when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

On this fine cool morning, all is still. Even the birds are quiet and a low-lying fog blankets the downward slope of the farm and drifts across the pond and through the trees. It feels like a Thoreau morning, and I wonder at all he saw and felt. I think of all those who came before and all they knew and wish I could offer one of them a cup of coffee and a seat on my porch as I put on my own horrible sneakers.

These are some of my favorite lines from literary masters of old. Can you guess who they are?

1. "About suffering, they were never wrong."

2. "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."

3. "A novel is a mirror walking along a main road."

4. "A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

5. "A writer’s material is what he cares about."

6. "Literature thrives on taboos.”

7. "Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it."

8.  "It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

9. "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

10. "I've led a good rich sexual life and I don’t see why it should be left out.”

11. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in  my

       own horrible sneakers."

So write of taboos-leave nothing out- and be wary of who you show your drafts to. Balance on a limb and fabricate. Observe the world carefully and don’t be afraid to write what you are passionate about. Hang a piece of art, arrange a bouquet, and write a sentence that fills a page. Be prepared to suffer.

1. Auden

2. Dickinson

3. Stendhal

4. Lichtenberg

5. Gardner

6. Burgess

7. Thoreau

8. Eliot

9. Wells

10. Miller

11. Parker

The opening quote is from Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts

Paper Lanterns

For the last post of August, let’s talk about the upside of drought and unrelenting heat. Let’s assume this record heat (August was the sixth driest and the hottest on record for the Great Lake State) is not a harbinger of what's to come, climate upturned on its axis, chill in the desert of Palmdale where my sister lives and asphyxiation in the upper midwest. So what can be an upside to drought? First, there are no mosquitoes. I mean, not one single solitary bloodsucker is left in the Thumb of Michigan. Second, in the still of the exhausted summer night outdoor candles stay lit. They burn all night, inspire and enthuse, the only draft the flutter of a moth's wing before it's coerced into the fire. Paper lanterns sway next to the Boston ferns, and I think of swaying to the dance in a gauzy skirt the color of summer.


Let's talk veggies and the bounty of summertime. Melons that won't usually fatten in Michigan have thrived in the record heat. Cantaloupe and Sugar Baby watermelons, fully seeded for the future, have graced our tables—homestead and market. Tomatoes dropping ripe from the vine take all our time-salsa, canning, and bread salad. Peppers ripening to red and orange in the heat take no backseat to tomatoes. Volunteer cilantro from last year's planting sprouts underneath the soaker hoses in the pepper row as if they know their rightful place, and we pick and we pick and we pick. The butternut and delicata winter squash are a golden tan with skins that cannot be pierced with a fingernail, hence ready for harvest.

So what does this have to do with writing? What, I say, doesn't it have to do with it? We eat to live and writers live to write. I drink and eat and write. I bemoan my ability to keep up but the harvest is plentiful and I persevere and tend my soaker hoses and baby my laptop and long for the time to bring a new novel to fruition. I listen to music that gives me goose bumps like John Lennon’s Working Class Hero and then I go back outside to watch Orion march across the southern sky, because I have to. The new moon is dark and hidden like a story aching to surface. I’m writing about the secret everyone in my family knows but no one talks about. What are you afraid to write about? What are you waiting for?

Gravity

Many of my blogging friends are writing about love scenes and here I am, writing about dust. I wouldn't blame you if you hit exit. Get me the hell out of here! But I wish you'd stay. Sometimes I don't feel like writing about love. Oh, I like nothing better than a good love scene, the warm calloused hand sliding over the knee, under the skirt, oh, God! don't stop! and I like writing them as much as reading them. It gives me that funny feeling in the groin just thinking about it, but sometimes I have to write about what makes me sick.

Hospitals make me sick. The sterile maze of hallway, doors opened to bare backs on beds, the indignity of disease, how it diminishes and reduces one to zero. The gift shops all have the same trinkets and flowers and get-well balloons. Get well. Get well. But what if they won't let you go home? Then how do you get well? I suppose it's the smell that starts the quiver in my belly, the oh-I'm-going-to-be-sick twinge in my gut. I'm not much use in a hospital, other than to sneak in cookies and date bread (real food) books and newspapers, but even when you pull the curtain you can still hear the roommate groaning. I can't adjust a pillow without glancing at the monitor and staring at the squiggly life lines and all those fluctuating numbers, and I think I have a heart problem or a lung disorder or what if that little bump on my ankle that when rubbed sends tingles into my toes is not benign? What if it gets bigger? Why can't I make an appointment? I so admire nurses and caretakers and doctors and everyone who works in a hospital. My sister held hearts in the operating room, the warm center of gravity in the palms of her hands without moving for however long it took to disconnect and reconnect and suction and suture. She retired early but not without varicose veins. All that standing. I stand most of the day too, but I could never do what she did.


The door swings empty. Dust settles.
Flesh accommodates.
Even a feather obeys gravity.
The old lady stumbles but she recovers.
I hurt therefore I am.

When you crossed the hospital lobby
Did you think to escape
With only shaking hands?
Pick up your feet.

Make a wrong turn and you could come up missing,
Walking back at yourself with the look of another.
in elongated mirrors hung in corners.
Don’t breathe.

Grandma couldn’t without the ventilator,
hissing and pumping a nasal gurgle.
(Did I dream that noise?)
The incident, unforeseen, took her down
one day before she was to come home,
one from which she could not recover.

It’s raining again at the window bed,
Steady as the pocket watch ticking
from where no one can see it.
It paces us through gathering events.
In a place like this . . . the only time I ever saw
my father down.

Out of time. And when was it ours?
Sometimes we can’t go home but would it matter
if we don’t recover?
We get along. Dust settles.

Is your glass half empty or half full?

What I was reminded of during a recent contest at Miss Snark's is that a good opening sentence gives setting and conflict. I repeat...a good opening sentence gives setting and conflict.

There are basic writing rules we all have to occasionally be reminded of. Some of my favorites are:

* 90% of writing is rewriting.
* Write what you know but more importantly, be honest.
* Write about what you're most afraid to write about.
(The hardest exercise I was ever given was to write about 10 things I was afraid to write about.)
* Use synesthesia in your writing “the old man had a wrinkled voice" but avoid the easy comparisons.
* Be completly absorbed in your writing.

This writing business is a solitary endeavor. An exhilarating, lonely, heart-breaking endeavor.