And That Reminds Me...

The ultimate payoff for a writer is when a reader says, “That reminds me…”  meaning that something you wrote – a character, a place, a situation, an emotion – triggered something from the reader’s own experience.  Sure, a check in the mailbox is nice, especially when it arrives in the nick of time, but checks get cashed and money gets spent.  What connects with a reader is more likely to last.

I thought about that when I got a note from a friend who had read my recent blog “Among The Graves At Thiacourt,” about my visit to an American cemetery in France, the final resting place of 4,000 of our soldiers from World War One.  For my friend, it brought back the memory and emotion of his visit to the cemetery at Omaha Beach, where American casualties from World War Two are buried.  And that’s the magic of writing and reading: two imaginations intersect through the telling of a story.  What I wrote resonated with my friend.  I couldn’t ask for more.

I get a fair number of similar responses from folks who read my stories.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, is set in a small town somewhere in the South.  It bears a pretty good resemblance to the small southern town where I grew up.  I set the story there because it was familiar territory.  I populated my fictional town with the kinds of people I knew growing up.  After the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who said, “You wrote about my hometown in Iowa.”  That told me there was a good measure of universality about the characters and the story, and that’s why it resonated with a reader from another part of the country.

Setting and plot can trigger something in a reader’s imagination, but the part of a story that’s most likely to connect is character.  For that to happen, a writer has to be honest and authentic with the characters he or she imagines.  The writer is asking a reader to take a leap of faith into the story, and to do that, the leap has to start from solid ground.  You have to be able to believe the character is plausible – someone you might know – and the character has to be presented warts and all.  We human beings are combinations of dark and light, and if, in presenting a character’s story I omit the dark places, you know right away the character isn’t authentic.  The same goes if something the character says or does doesn’t ring true.  And that probably means you aren’t ready to take the leap of faith.

The central character in Home Fires Burning is a crusty curmudgeon of a small-town newspaper editor named Jake Tibbetts.  I knew I had presented Jake honestly and authentically when a reader called me and said, “I stayed up all night with that book, and if I could have gotten my hands on Jake Tibbetts at three o’clock this morning, I’da wrung his neck.”  But then he went on to say that Jake had a fiercely independent streak and a willingness to speak his mind, good traits for a newspaper editor.  My reader and I had connected through Jake.

A story is a meeting place between two imaginations – the writer’s and the reader’s.  Every reader brings his or her own knowledge, experiences, beliefs and emotions to the reading of the story and finds things in it the writer might never have suspected were there.  It’s a kind of alchemy, a magic that exists nowhere else, and it makes each reader’s experience with the story unique.  When a reader tells me it worked, I’m satisfied.

But…I’m also happy to find a check in the mailbox.

TWO GREAT MUSICIANS AND WHAT THEY SAW

I doubt that Andrea Bocelli and Doc Watson ever met each other, but they sure had a lot in common, and not just blindness.  Both men saw things the rest of us don’t, and turned them into great music.

Arthel “Doc” Watson lost his sight before the age of one from an eye infection.  His parents taught him to work hard and take care of himself – and all of his life, he did.  He bought his first guitar with money he earned helping his brother chop down trees, and then he taught himself to play it.  By the time of his death at the age of the age of 89, he had won 7 Grammy awards and a Grammy lifetime achievement award.

And what a lifetime it was.  He not only wrote and played and sang songs, he created a whole new style of guitar picking.  He had a world-wide legion of devoted fans who listened to his music and went to his concerts and were dazzled by his artistry and captivated by his genuine warmth.  He was a fine musician and a fine human being.

Andrea Bocelli, the superb Italian tenor, was born with poor eyesight and lost it entirely after an accident on a soccer field at age 12.  By then he had already fallen in love with music, learned to play the piano and other instruments, and at age 7 decided that his voice was the best of them.  At last count, his recordings have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.  Bocelli, like Doc Watson, has a devoted following who appreciate not only the quality of his voice, but the passion he brings to the interpretation of great music.

I once heard Doc Watson say that losing his sight made his develop and rely on his other senses, especially his hearing.  He told of playing hide-and-seek with his brother, and being able to tell where the brother was by listening for the tiny sound of his movements and breathing.  He developed a keen ear for voices, and if he heard you once, he knew who you were.  Unquestionably, he brought all of that to his music.  He listened to fiddlers, took apart their technique in his head, and adapted it to his guitar.  It was unlike anything guitarists had ever heard, and the best of them adapted and built on his unique style.

Bocelli, with his keen ear, finds and uses the subtle nuances of his songs.  In an interview a couple of years ago, he talked about the value of silence.  “Even in the most beautiful music there are some silences, which are there so we can witness the importance of silence.  Silence is more important than ever, as life today is full of noise.”  Listen carefully to Bocelli sing, and you hear how beautifully he uses silence.  He appreciates that even more because his life is consumed with sound, not sight.

I thought of Doc Watson and Andrea Bocelli when I was speaking to a group of children about reading and imagination.  “Imagination,” I told them, “is what you see when your eyes are closed.”  It’s the pictures in your mind that are triggered by everything else in your world – what you see, hear, taste, feel.   And if we don’t have use of our eyes – like Bocelli and Watson – our imaginations are even more exquisitely cultivated by the senses we do have.  I believe those two wonderful musicians give something unique and special to those of us who admire them because they are using their imaginations to the fullest.  In this way, they see things others miss.

When I write my stories, I’m in a sense writing with my eyes closed.  I’ve entered the world of the characters I’ve imagined.  I can see and hear and touch them, watch them move about and bump up against each other and make sparks and a story.  My job then is to give them free rein, to be honest and faithful with them, and to trust them to lead me through the underbrush and find the path.

If I do that, things turn out fine.  And in a very small way, I get fleeting glimpses of what artists like Andrea Bocelli and Doc Watson see.  It’s beautiful.

Imagination In A Jar

My friend Andrew posted this photo of his son Sean on Facebook the other day, and it got me to thinking about Raggedy Ann and Andy.  Or more to the point, kids and imagination.

When our daughters were small, they loved stuffed things – dolls, animals, the like.  Our older one had an entire menagerie that we referred to collectively as “the friends,” and when we took a trip, the friends had to go along.  They were simply part of the family, and for our daughter, they were a little community of bonny companions with whom she played and talked.  She endowed each of them with a personality that came right out of her imagination.

Our younger daughter likewise had a bevy of stuffed friends, and for her, they often made up a classroom.  She liked nothing better than to arrange the friends in front of a chalkboard and teach school to them.  Her lesson plans were quite involved, and ranged across the firmament of subjects the daughter was herself learning in school.

For both kids, the menagerie included Raggedy Ann and Andy.  I figured out that the best thing about Ann and Andy was, they didn’t do anything.  And therefore they could do anything.  Ann and Andy didn’t cry, burp, close their eyes, or say “Mama.”  Our girls had dolls that did those sorts of things, but they weren’t much interested in them.  Ann and Andy, though, could be, do, or say anything that the girls’ imaginations could conjure up.  The possibilities were limitless.  I think the same thing applies to Sean and his jar.  He can imagine the jar being full of anything or nothing, or being just a jar, or something entirely different.

Lots of toys these days do lots of things.  You wind them up or put in batteries and turn them on or switch on the remote, and then you sit and watch them do whatever they do.  And that’s it.  They are what they are.  But if you’re a kid (or an adult, for that matter) with imagination, they can become much more.  And maybe, the less they do, the more they can become.

Kids are born with a vast capacity for imagination, plopped down in a world that’s strange and fascinating and laden with possibilities.  There are all sorts of ways to cultivate imagination, and the best one is reading.  It starts with the kid being held and cuddled by someone older, feeling safe and warm and hearing the comforting rise and fall of a familiar voice.  The child associates that good feeling with whatever reading material is being held in the older person’s hands, full of pictures and little black things that squiggle across the page.  At some point, as language develops, the child begins to realize that the pictures and squiggles are telling a story, setting off more pictures in the child’s mind.  And once that happens, the kid is hooked.  Imagination, I tell young people, is what you see when your eyes are closed.  You might be looking at what’s on the page, but what you’re really seeing is that movie reel going on inside.

When a child’s imagination is nurtured and set free, good things happen.  Kids with imagination do well in school and grow up to be people who solve problems because they can envision how things can be better.  For a kid with imagination, a toy is just a receptacle for possibility, and the sophistication of the toy doesn’t matter so much.  Raggedy Ann and Andy will do just fine.  Or just a jar.

Fun With Briggs & Stratton

I can tell it’s Spring by the sound of lawnmowers in my neighborhood.  It’s been cool and wet for the past couple of months where I live, but the weather has warmed and things are blooming and growing.  Especially grass.

The sound of a lawnmower in full throat takes me back to my boyhood.  My Dad would advance me enough money at the beginning of a summer to buy a lawnmower: 21-inch cut, Briggs & Stratton engine, and self-propelled – by me.  I would line up customers and spend the summer pushing that mower across expanses of bermuda grass.

Mowing Bermuda with a dinky mower in the hot, humid fullness of a South Alabama growing season is like trying to hack your way through dense jungle with a Swiss Army knife.  Many of my customers – the cheapskates – insisted on having their lawns mowed only every other week.  By the time I arrived, the bermuda would be three inches high or more.  For three months, I would propel that mower with my skinny teenaged body under blazing sun, praying for rain so I could go home, and dreading rain because it made the bermuda grow that much faster.

But I persevered.  By the end of the summer, I would have made enough money to repay Dad’s loan, with a little pocket change left over.  Being no dummy, I knew what Dad, that sly devil, was up to: keeping me occupied and out of trouble.  I suppose it worked.  I have no criminal record.

And then one Spring, I escaped.  Dad approached, loan money in hand.  “Au contraire,” I said, “I have a job at the radio station!”  I spent that glorious summer in air conditioned comfort, spinning records and dedicating mushy songs to my girlfriend.  It was powerful incentive for a career in broadcasting.

But my lawnmowing summers were not wasted.  In my novel Captain Saturday, teenaged Wilbur Baggett self-propels an under-powered lawnmower across expanses of North Carolina lawns, struggling against heat, humidity, vegetation and a sense of powerlessness.  Later, when grown-up Will Baggett, Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman, loses his job, he falls back on his boyhood profession. 

Writing books of fiction is somewhat like mowing lawns.  You struggle against the elements – fear, self-doubt, failures of imagination, rejection --  and just keep applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair until you arrive exhausted at the far end of the thing and write “The End.”  In the process, you go time and time again to the well of your experiences, transforming them into something new.  It’s what my teacher Barry Hannah called “fracturing reality and putting it back together as truth.”

A good writer never throws away anything.  Even a wretched old lawnmower.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo e-readers.

The Art of Geometry

           

          I’ve never been a whiz at math.  I take after my father, who once said, “There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t.”  In my family, my mother kept the checkbook.  In junior high and high school, I was fortunate enough to have math teachers who, through patience and compassion, managed to teach me enough of the basics to get by.  In college, I took geology to avoid freshman algebra.  I know more about rocks than numbers, which isn’t much.

            So it was a surprise to me in high school that I discovered a love for geometry.  I might be a semi-klutz at equations, but I was good with shapes.  My teacher wasn’t surprised; geometry isn’t really math, she said, it’s logic.  It’s the way things fit together, the beauty of lines and angles in time and space.  Sure, there are numbers involved, but they are numbers you can see and feel, that you can push and pull and twist into fascinating objects.  The limits of geometry are imagination.

            When I began to think about how I do this storytelling thing I do, it occurred to me that part of it is geometry.  A story has lines and angles and shapes that exist in time and space – geometry as architecture. 

I start with a central character I believe in, and that’s the foundation.  I surround that person with other characters, some of which are actually places (a town, for instance, can be a character in my story).  I put the people in a particular time and place, give them a dilemma, and turn them loose to bump up against each other and make sparks.  Things begin to happen, to move in directions.  I’m building a house, with walls and doors and windows, floors and roofs, furniture and interior design, clothes in the closet and toys on the floor, all of the things that make the house a home where people live.

I don’t know how the whole thing will look when I start, or really even while I’m building.  I know a few things that might serve as signposts when I’ve reached a certain point.  But I have to be open to possibility and serendipity.  When I finish, there it is: a geometric shape, something like no other, fashioned out of my over-active imagination.  Each reader, looking at my geometry from a special and unique angle, will see something a little different.  Hopefully, all will see something artful – a memorable thing or two, and the geometry that helps it hang together.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo.