My Story's Real Work

Motorvating over that hill

In The Real Work: The Mystery of Mastery, Adam Gopnik describes a rarefied few professional magicians whose expertise, invention, and virtuosity as doing the “real work” of the craft. Gopnik describes the people at the top of the game, whether it be chess playing or bread-baking, boxing or baking. Just a few artists, he writes are doing the real work in their field, pushing the limits of possibility. Just a few people are at the logarithmically thinning end of the bell curve in any field. You can play a parlor game about this for anything: voice-over actors, symphony conductors, brutalist architects, etc.

I consider Mark Knopfler is among a few doing the real work [warning: comment bait] of guitar playing, not just for his expertise and virtuosity, but his uncanny ability to coax genre-defining sounds out of any guitar: Stratocaster — “Sultans of Swing”; Les Paul — “Money for Nothing”; and National Resonator — “Romeo & Juliet”. In “The Walk of Life”, he makes his Telecaster sound as if he was channeling 1960s Bakersfield. The video is worth a watch, clips of professional athletes preparing to play at the top of the game. At first I thought the song and the video minimized the transcendent qualities of making art, and that professional athletes were an already much lionized and economically rewarded cohort. But “The Walk of Life” is not all about peak performance. There, the real work is about sweating it out, screwing up, and getting out there everyday.

Here come Johnny singing oldies, goldies
”Be-bop-a-lula”, baby, “What’d I Say”
Here come Johnny singin' "I Got a Woman"
Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay

In short, the song and video summarize a decent journeyman trying to make it through the day, and there’s something transcendent in that.

Stephen King is at the top of the writing game [also comment bait]. I’m not as familiar with his fiction, but his book on craft, On Writing: A Memoir of Craft, is in my top five of the genre. Writers, he writes, spend too much time thinking about who the characters are and not enough time thinking about what they desire, what motivates them.

That’s where the real work of fiction is done, going from flesh and blood to fears and desires and from there to tumult and tension. Whether for love or money, motivations advance civilizations and bring civilizations to decline. Motivations turn us from ciphers into paragons, from button-pushers to demigods, from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

Regards determining and illustrating the motivations of the characters in Lazar and the Yamantaka, I have Lazar’s point-of-view and a limited authorial point-of-view to tell my story. All the other characters’ emotions must be determined by objective cues, what actually happens or what is actually said: a frown, a smile, a slap across the cheek, a caustic remark, or a tender affirmation. Thinking about my characters’ motivations is an exercise I’ve taken to and recommend it to anyone for any number of things.

Elizabeth alerted me that the same goes for actors: What are the characters’ objectives in the scene? What are the character’s motives overall?

In my story’s beginning, I have a number of expendable characters whose purpose is to get my little weirdo to the next scene. But I’m thinking how even their motivations matter: the jewelry woman’s desire for a fine shop in a reputable bazaar must have details that point to that; Fen, the Alan, has the fairly simple motivation of wanting to get laid, and his speech and actions must show this; Ortukh, the landlord, simply wants to get on the good end of the deal; finally, the market protectors want to get paid well for maiming and killing Lazar.

Of course the motivations of Lazar, my main character, and his actions will be the main source of tension and tumult. Lazar’s desire to reach his destination, or to receive the great secret, or at least some kind of enlightenment, and the many obstacles, distractions, and personal shortcomings is the reason for all the pages in between.

Epilogue: For some reason, I submitted this essay to one of my critique groups for notes. I’m not sure if I can do justice to their opinions, but the questions did come up, “Why do you even do this at all? Why not just write the novel?” They are points well taken. My answer is this. I am so excited by the exercise [“There are no exercises.” — John Gardner], but I feel a little evangelistic about imagining what character’s back stories are. One colleague concurred that even writing a whole story about a character that never shows up is a plausible notion, but why write about it? With these essays, am I doing the real work?

In Position Paper #53: National Archivist, poet Andrea Lawlor writes about a near-future queer utopian seceded Western Massachussets:

We will keep kitchen archives & garden archives & comms archives & decisions archives & process archives & experiment archives & we will consult these archives when we need background or inspiration or instruction, or for pleasure, the great pleasure of the archive, the great archive of pleasure; we will call this art, how we spend our days & nights.

I might not be writing about a near-future queer utopian seceded Western Massachusetts, but I want to think this whole writing thing through, and when I learn something, whether it’s for you or for me, for the sake of story-telling, or for love or money, I want that something to be on the page, even a virtual page like this one will do.