Darn Close to a Perfect Story

"Show, don't tell": writers are dogged by this one, as I noted in an earlier post, and not only because showing rather than telling is critical to the creation of a good story, but also because it's so hard to do. We all want to fall back on the crutch of explaining things, which is both easy and somehow comforting. I'm reminded of a simple and beautifully played gesture by Robert Duvall in his role as an over-the-hill newspaper editor in The Paper: he's a heavy smoker, and we've already seen him hacking, but in passing he makes a point of gently patting his lighter and pack of cigarettes where they sit beside him on the desk--just making sure the fix is still handy when he needs it.

There are a lot of really good books out there that challenge writers' addiction to telling and explaining too much: not only Robert McKee's Story, noted earlier, but Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and David King. (This one is famous for the helpful acronym RUE--Resist the Urge to Explain. Romance writer Kathleen Nance has a good, quick discussion of this and related topics on her Web page.) As good as those books are, though, it stands to reason--given the subject at hand--that the best possible guide would be, not a work of nonfiction that tells us not to tell, but a work of fiction that shows us how to show.

For this I can find no more nearly perfect example than "The Swimmer," a short story by John Cheever published in the New Yorker in 1964 and four years later released as a motion picture starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack. I read the story when I was about eighteen or so, and, having just finished watching the film now nearly twenty-three years later, I wonder just what I really understood of Cheever's tale back then. This is a story for grown-ups if there ever was one, and yet I saw something there that has stayed with me all these years.

I first became attracted to Cheever's work when I was fresh out of Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and any contact with the outside world seemed an enormous privilege. I happened to pick up a copy of Time magazine containing his obituary, and something the reporter said--about a world of neatly trimmed suburban lawns and glasses of gin and tonic over shaved ice--immediately hooked me. As a southerner, I've tended to feel an antipathy toward the fact that the preponderance of American fiction centers on the northeastern part of the nation. That's where most American writers come from, of course, but I'll confess to having been left cold by many a prep-school tale or yet another story of a middle-aged northeastern suburbanite confronting his mortality/sexuality/blah-blah-blah-ality. And on the surface, "The Swimmer" is just another entrant on that long gray line. But it's not: this is literature in the greatest of traditions, harkening back to James Joyce and Huckleberry Finn, to Dante and Odysseus--all the way back to Genesis and the Gilgamesh.

Overblown comparisons? I don't think so; after all, "The Swimmer"--the story of one man's quixotic quest to swim across his neighborhood, from pool to pool--is, though some might call it a mock epic, an epic in the more true sense. As with Joyce's Ulysses, the fact that the stakes are deceptively trivial should not prevent the discerning reader/viewer from understanding that what we are witnessing here is hardly less than a literal life and death struggle. If it's an epic, then that makes Ned Merrill, our titular athlete/explorer, a hero. Many would call him an antihero, but I think you'd have to have a pretty hard heart not to root for Neddy all the way--even when you find out some things I'm not going to reveal here.

I haven't gone back and read the story in all these years, but can only imagine how powerful it would be now if it has stayed with me all this time. (This doesn't always work, of course: when I was thirteen, I thought Jack London's Martin Eden was a masterpiece, but only a few years later I made the mistake of reading it again and realized it was little more than whiny drivel--specifically, whiny tough-guy drivel.) But seeing the movie at forty-one gave me an entirely different appreciation for what Ned confronts--those very real terrors that we all know, the ones far more frightening than giant anacondas or serial killers in hockey masks. On that basis, I'd say this is the scariest film I've seen other than Glengarry Glen Ross. Imagine if Twilight Zone had been on HBO (which of course didn't exist back then, but which would have allowed Rod Serling much greater creative elbow room), and that's The Swimmer.

A few caveats. Because the movie was made in 1968, it has more than a few of the cheesy gimmicks to which filmmakers of that time were given: dreamy dissolves, a little bit of heavy-handed imagery here and there, and a score by Marvin Hamlisch that, while beautiful, ventures into the realm of the lachrymose. Some of the supporting actors are a bit wooden, and you do have to put up with about three minutes of a very young Joan Rivers, who admittedly does a good job with her role. But the ladies (and some of the men) won't mind watching Burt Lancaster run around in a Speedo all movie long. The guy was fifty-five at the time, believe it or not, and in an era long before working out was a standard habit, he still looked good enough to walk around barely dressed--and in one scene, daring for the time, almost entirely undressed.

It's no mistake, of course, that Neddy Merrill is all but naked for the entire film, which takes place virtually in real time. (Incidentally, it was a box-office flop, because audiences at the time weren't ready for something like this.) But I've already said more than enough here, and anyway my point was that this tale--both the short story and the movie--is a classic illustration of showing rather than telling. If you're a writer, watch the film, and next time you're working on something and you have an urge to explain a bunch of backstory, remember The Swimmer: had Cheever (shown left) not doggedly resisted the urge to explain, cutting down what was originally a novella of some 150 pages, he literally would have had no story at all. If he'd chosen to introduce us to Ned, emerging from that first swimming pool to the offer of a gin and tonic with a twist of lemon, in such a way that we already knew everything about him, then there would have been no point in going on. Click on the image (right side) for a link to this book.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo; or, When the Country Rocked and Raged

Recently I've rediscovered the music of The Flying Burrito Brothers, a little-known but highly influential band formed by Gram Parsons after he left the Byrds in 1968. Parsons, more than any other figure in music, was responsible for the rise of country-rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and with it the growth of the singer-songwriter movement in the years that followed. This move in turn helped bring about the blurring between country and rock that we see today, but it wasn't always that way.

Back in the day, country and rock didn't just symbolize two different tastes, but two whole different worlds. Never mind that rock 'n roll owes almost as much to country as it does to R 'n B--in fact, it's not too much of a stretch to say that the entire medium emerged from an amalgam of the various styles employed by poor blacks and poor whites in the southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. But whereas the rockers of the 1960s saw themselves as philosophically aligned with the music of Detroit (despite the fact that that music was far more unabashedly commercial), they could not have been more removed from Nashville.

People think our nation is divided now, but we have only to look at other eras--a certain conflict in the 1860s, for instance--to put today's mood into a proper context. The divisions of the 1960s were arguably as strong, leading as they did to outbursts of violence that, while mild compared to the passions that raged in the years leading up to and including the Civil War era, were far beyond anything we're experiencing now. Perhaps it's in the nature of America to be divided, because we're a nation founded on the principle of individual thought, but that's another discussion.

What's important here is the cultural importance of the marriage between country and rock, an idea we take for granted today, but one that seemed truly revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary, depending on who was talking) four decades ago. Rock 'n roll was the music of hippies, anarchists, communists, practitioners of free love and experimenters with substances virtually unknown to the wider culture only a few years before. Producers and consumers of rock were mostly young kids from privileged or relatively privileged backgrounds, the beneficiaries of an unprecented prosperity that made possible for the first time in history the opening up of university doors to a solid plurality--if not a majority--of the youth population.
Country, on the other hand, was--to an even greater extent than today--the music of the workin' man, the salt of the earth. It represented a world of people who believed in God and the flag, who relied more on common sense than education, a segment of the nation (far larger than the hippies, by the way) who had nothing but disdain for everything the hippies represented. Therein lay a great irony, in that hippie revolutionaries claimed to speak for the proletariat, yet the proletariat by and large wanted nothing to do with them.

When President Nixon spoke of the "Silent Majority"--the hardworking, conservative populace that believed in a strong military, law and order, and a host of ideas antithetical to those coming out of Greenwich Village, Harvard Yard, Haight-Asbury, and Hollywood--these were the people he meant. True, many of them were, in musical terms, truly silent, because most represented a generation for which music had nothing like the kind of power it possessed for those of us born after World War II, but if the Silent Majority had a sound, it was that of the acoustic guitar, the standup bass, and the dulcimer. Theirs was an ethic embodied in the words of Merle Haggard's smash 1969 country hit, "Okie from Muskogee":

We don't make a party out of lovin'
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

The song is a scathing dismissal of the hippie lifestyle and all its facets--not just free love and long hair, but drugs, anarchism, opposition to the military--all the behaviors glorified in rock 'n roll but despised by the denizens of Nashville and their cohorts around the nation.

Hence the boldness of the statement made by Parsons, whose International Submarine Band (1965-67) first introduced the idea of country rock. That idea gained far greater exposure after he joined the Byrds, who had already been moving in that direction but whose 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo served to introduce country rock to the world. And the introduction was not well received: David Fricke, in the liner notes to a 1997 reissue of Sweetheart, called it "career suicide" for the Byrds.

Though some of the songs on this album (most were covers) fit in with the zeitgeist--for example, Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd," well-timed for an era when outlaws had newly reemerged as heroes thanks in large part to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde--one can only imagine what progressives made of the group's unironic cover of "The Christian Life" by Ira and Charlie Louvin. The very fact that the album consists almost entirely of covers is a reflection of Columbia Records' hesitatancy about the career move: the label forced the group to pack in a great deal of more typical Byrds material, and left out several original Parsons compositions later included on the reissue. As for the reaction of the country world, this too isn't hard to imagine: later, when Parsons--setting out on a solo career when he left the Flying Burrito Brothers--sought to work with Haggard, the latter dismissed him as an acid-head who didn't understand country.

Acid-head he may have been--Parsons lived fast and died young in 1973 at a mere twenty-six years of age--but there's no denying that Gram Parsons was a visionary and a great interpreter of American folk idioms. The very fact that his achievement doesn't immediately seem so remarkable today is the greatest evidence of his ideas' triumph.

Spam Spasm

Would you believe it? Minutes after posting late last night (actually, early this morning), I already had a comment. I opened it with excitement--this on the Blackberry, the laptop having been put away--only to find something like this: "Great post. You made some really good points. I have a blog, too. It's about finding legitimate home-based business opportunities. Check it out at" and the URL followed.

(Imagine the following words in the nutty voice of the late Sam Kinison or some early Bill Murray character): Will the madness ever cease? Spam in emails doesn't bother me that much, primarily because most spam filters are likely to keep out real mail. Rather than run the risk of losing one legitimate note, I'll put up with a hundred promoting cheap bathtub Viagra, opportunities to make $20,000 a week surfing web sites, or invitations to "Watch Britney Spears Masturbating Live!" (No kidding--that's a real subject line from several years ago, before she was married and a mom and supposedly "all growns up," to quote Vince Vaughn in Swingers.) But spam on a blog, where each post is valuable--representing as it does someone, often a person you don't even know, who took the time to publicly respond to your words? Nah, that ain't gonna cut it.

Note to spammers: your nefarious avocation is purely a numbers game, based on the sadly accurate notion that for every 10,000 or so of these stinkbombs you lay out, there's bound to be a couple of suckers. However, this particular blog--due in part to its often-elevated tone (okay, I'm being a little facetious here) and even more so to its auteur's sporadic posting habits--is hardly a high-volume location. In other words, you're wasting your time, and I'll only erase your posts. Better yet, Blogger/Blogspot has a spam-filtering feature, so there will be a lock on the door to those whose intentions are less than honorable. Thank you, and have a good day sending out 419 scam letters that begin something like this: "My father, the Honorable Joseph M. Undugu, was, until the recent coup, finance minister of Burkina Faso...."

No Time to Post Anything!

I'm at the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW--they've got a great web site) conference in Nashville, and it's been tiring but fun. Back to back to back to back appointments all day with writers who represent a variety of levels of experience and maturity in their work, from those who are multipublished or about to be, to those who need to go back and address some of the fundamentals that bedevil all writers to some degree.

Chief among those challenges is the age-old problem called "show, don't tell"--so easy to say, so hard to teach, and yet we all know the difference when we read. As a great literary agent once said (no names here, but let's just say she and I have had children together!), one way to know whether you're telling rather than showing is to ask yourself whose POV a particular passage is in. If you can't find a point of view there--and that means the POV of a character you've established as a POV figure--then chances are very strong that you're telling rather than showing. Deidre used to gig me about that all the time where my own writing was concerned, because I had this tendency to fall into what she called "The Voice in the Clouds". Usually the writing in such passages was beautiful, but even the most gorgeous use of language is usually not enough to hold the reader's attention if he or she has a sense that the narrator has somehow left the building.

One of the few times a writer has successfully (though some would debate this) used the "Voice in the Clouds" is in Moby Dick. Even though Ishmael is ostensibly your narrator, there are places where the narration seems to come from a god-like figure above the action. And some of what Melville does there is as good as gold: for instance, the chapter on "The Winding-Line" or something like that--a line of rope carefully traced around the perimeter of a whaling boat, prepared to unwind when a whale pulls on the hook far below--is absolute poetry. But most of us aren't Herman Melvilles, and anyway, it must be remembered that his inestimable classic was a flop at the time of its publication in 1851, the author all but forgotten for the next three-quarters of a century. So as I like to say to writers when taking note of those who successfully evade the rules, "Do not try this at home!"

At the conference, I've been heavily promoting three books: Story by Robert McKee, Writing Well by Donald Hall, and Dare to Be a Great Writer by Leonad Bishop. The first of these, which I've only begun reading recently, is nothing short of a revelation. It's about screenwriting, and has little to say with regard to the novel, but novelists would do well to gain some understanding of the screenwriter's discipline, which is indeed a discipline in all senses of the word. Even more important, McKee forces the honest reader/writer to ask hard questions as to the core story he or she is trying to tell, and makes it clear that anything that doesn't serve the purpose of that story must be cut out.

I'm reminded of how awed I was by the writing of the original Die Hard movie. It's hard to see it afresh now, because that sort of plot has been done so many times since then--and usually quite poorly, as in the two sequels--but when it came out, that movie was one of the freshest, most original things I'd ever seen. There's not an ounce of fat on that script, which is as close to perfection as just about any piece of writing I've ever encountered.

In typical fashion, I've had plenty to say--probably too much--at a time when I thought I was just about talked out for the day. And the ridiculous thing is that I could write more still, only I need to get some rest for another long series of appointments tomorrow. One last thing, though, about this conference: if you think the Christian element equates to boring, stodgy, or any of the other qualities that might naturally come to mind when that word is mentioned, you're actually behind the curve. There's an amazing amount of diversity within the CBA (Christian Booksellers' Association), and even more so in the realm of Christian writers whose work is being published in the larger ABA (American Booksellers' Association) market. And while there's still plenty of CBA fiction that your ninety-eight-year-old great aunt Irma could read without batting an eye, a number of writers are pushing the boundaries where portrayals of such touchy subjects as spirituality and sexuality are concerned. As with many another arena of creative expression, it's great to know the parameters--and then to challenge them.