Writing Fictions, Making Texts

Et in Arcadia Ego

To write, to perform any art, is not merely or even mainly to create--it is to make, it is to work with something, to form it out of materials already at hand. Despite its literally down-to-earth origins in the Latin creare, to produce or cause to grow, create cannot help but float away, far from the desk on which I write and the figurative furniture of life about which I write, the small everyday things which inhabit most fiction. Create cannot help but bring godlike creation to mind, from its ancient relationship to Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, to the more modern usurpation of Creator by the King James Bible. It has echoes of creation ex nihilo, which is far from what I do. It also, in contemporary America at least, conjures the specter of "creative writing," the genericism that fiction writers and poets have allowed to be foisted on themselves. Mention an interest in creative writing too often and you'll inevitably be asked about your inspiration (or told where you can find some), and with inspiration comes the thought of breathing life into things and, before you know it, your vocation has once again taken leave of this earth.

No, writing is not mainly creating. The idea of creating may be useful for sustaining a certain productive tension, but essentially, to slightly turn Edison's famous remark, it focuses too much attention on the one per cent inspiration in one's soul and too little on the ninety-nine per cent perspiration saturating one's desk. The work's the thing. As I said above, to write is to make, to form something out of materials at hand. Like many Anglo- Saxon words, make has a blunt crisp sound I like, a gritty aural texture. It not only alludes to some of the same ideas as create, but also carries connotations of shaping something to one's will and of success (to "make it" is to succeed). It derives most recently from the Middle English maken, to put together, and more distantly from the Greek magenai and its conjectured Indo-European root mag-, to knead (Cf. both Barnhart and Partridge). Exactly. The hands are the key. The written word cannot be literally handled, yet words are tools. Among many other writers, Walter Ong and Jay Bolter have pointed out that writing is a technology; a technology, as Bolter describes it, "for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience" (Bolter 1991, 33). Ong notes that whereas it is easy for us to recognize the traditional and the new ways for distributing and preserving writing--the printing press and the computer--as technologies, writing itself we have so deeply interiorized that it is ironically difficult for to realize that

"Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist" (Ong, 81-2).

In earlier cultures, before writing had been "taken in and become a habit of mind" (Bolter 1991, 36), considering it a technology was not so difficult. The Greek root techne included not only crafts we would immediately see as technological--masonry, carpentry, pottery--but also art, epic poetry, sports and other fields requiring specialized, developed skills (cf. Bolter 1991, 35-7, and Mitcham and Casey, 36-7). It should come as no surprise, then, that tracing techne back to its Indo-European root, tekth--variously defined as to put in hand, to weave, to build (of wood)--reveals that technology springs from the same source as words for not only such tangible things as textile and texture, but also such seeming abstractions as text and technique (Cf. both Barnhart and Partridge). Both halves of the vague, airy "creative writing" have settled back to earth so that some actual work can begin. As I said above, to write is not to create ex nihilo, but to form and shape materials at hand, to make texts with technology and technique. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle, in a discussion of the etymology of technology as developed by Eric Partridge, state it thus:

"Literature conveys not concepts existing in a void, but concepts worked over to present a richness of felt experience. As Partridge's Origins suggest, 'texts' in literature 'put' ideas 'in hand,' as it were, to frame knowledge within the dramatic fabric of experience, even as the technology of books and book production literally brings ideas 'to hand'" (Greenberg and Schachterle, 16).

Do these distinctions matter? They shouldn't, and yet for many people contemplating the prospect of the era of electronic publication--what Bolter has called "the late age of print" (Bolter 1991, 2)--they do. It is not my purpose to answer those arguments here, although I do discuss them some in my exploration of the nascent "art world" of hypertext fiction. For now, suffice it to say that in thinking about how electronic [media? see Ong 175ff.] will affect my writing, I do not see it as an encroachment of Technology on a formerly sacrosanct Arcadia of "naturally" produced art. It's certainly permissible to worry about the future of the book--being someone who enjoys not only texts but also books as artifacts (and also works in a Special Collections Library), I do myself. But the technophobic arguments are neither alarming nor new. It is not alarming because writers using that stance are employing, as we have seen, one completely interiorized technology--writing, the most radical of the three--distributed by a second if not internalized then certainly accepted as "true" environment of publication technology to critique a third as somehow "unnatural." It is not new because it is the same argument English Romantics directed toward the industrialization of printing in the early nineteenth century.

In Writing Space Bolter argues that because the electronic medium "denies the fixity of text" it threatens "traditional views of the author as authority and of literature as monument" that print tends to inculcate in readers. Rather than a threat, this can be seen as a healthy demystification of writing and writers:

The author's art is not a substitute for religious revelation, and authors do not lay down the law. The electronic author assumes once again the role of a craftsman, working with defined materials and limited goals. In constructing an electronic text as a network of related episodes, the author comes to emphasize the formal qualities of art, rather than the inspiration that transcends form. And as the Greeks understood, a sense of form is a sense of one's limits (Bolter 1991, 153).

The Wood and the Dough

Where do you get your ideas?

This question has elicited many a blank stare and smart aleck remark from writers, especially fiction writers. Yet it is a perfectly legitimate question. The temptation is to answer rhetorically. When things are going well the answer is, Where not?, in a dry spell, Where indeed? Some days it's hard to walk down the street without seeing a person, place, or incident that triggers the "what if . . ." reflex; other days the same street is as unyielding as the pavement. Between these two poles the work somehow progresses.

Where do I get my ideas? I pose the question to myself here, to explore how the answer may be altered by the new writing spaces. As I write fiction, I may or may not be aware of aspects of my artistic world that have sources in my social one. I don't consider myself a particularly autobiographical writer. In most cases anything I use from life is so altered and recontextualized in art that it would be hard for even close friends to detect the source. Yet everything I write has to emerge out of my experience of the world: as I have argued, a writer does not create so much as make, reshape what is already there. The question then becomes what, exactly, is there?

It is certainly not just stories. Oh, sometimes I get lucky and witness or hear of events that are essentially whole stories, begging to be written down. The events extend across enough time or experiential landscape to take on a narrative shape and reach a closure, even if only an episodic or unsatisfying one. At other times my luck is more mysterious--a plot appears fullblown in my head over the course of a few minutes or hours, source unknown. More often, though, I don't simply find a complete story but catch a whiff of one--an incident, an anecdote, a passing observation of a person or place--that piques my interest enough to make a note of it, mentally or physically. The scraps pile up, and may or may not fit with any other puzzle piece. They may plug right in to a story I'm already working on; they may never resonate again for me after that initial moment; or ten years later, as likely as not while I'm sitting in a committee meeting or mowing the lawn, I may suddenly sit up mentally and realize, That's why she poured that pancake batter on his head.

Both of these certainly happen, but they are not all that happens. By themselves they give the impression that ideas for stories are solely a matter of serendipity. But that is far from all. I go looking for them, too--not just stories but the details in which they live and the techniques through which they're told. Writing is inseparable from reading, not only in the sense of reading other printed materials but in the sense that what I write is my reading of my outer and inner worlds. I research topics, more often for non-fiction than for fiction, yet still quite often for either. I also read for pleasure (though I should say that my tastes are affected by my feeling that learning is pleasurable and not learning is not). The poet Randall Jarrell supposedly once advised, "Read at whim! Read at whim!" I take that advice to heart--life is too short, and I'm too slow a reader, to spend time reading texts, however supposedly important, that are boring.

When I turn to look at "Holier Than Thou" to see how I made it--as text and hypertext--I find all these ideas and more. But first of all what I see is two photographs of my parents. While writing about this topic, particularly while exploring the etymology of several words such as make and technology and text, it occurred to me that for a number of years I had kept my two favorite pictures of my parents posted at my office and home. The two photographs, of each individually, were taken years apart, and I came to my feeling of them as my favorites years apart, too. I had never made any particular connection between them until now. My father stands at one of his woodworking machines, shaping a piece of lumber; my mother stands in her kitchen, her hands in biscuit dough. It is the hands again, the making--my father fitting together and my mother kneading. I find myself again back at the root of make, mag-, to knead, and the common root of text and technology, tekth-, to put in hand, to weave, to build (of wood). The wood and the dough. I don't have to look any further to find the roots of my urge to write, the root of my fiction. It is already contained in the history of the word:

fiction, n.-- F., fr. L. fictionem, acc. of fictio, "a forming, shaping", fr. fictus, pp. of fingere, "to form, shape". The original meaning of this verb was "to knead". It derives fr. I.-E. base *dheigh-, *dhoigh-, dhigh-, "to knead, form out of clay, form, shape", whence OE. dag, "dough"; see dough and -ion. (Klein, 589).

It is a story that spans most of the twentieth century, so it is not autobiographical. I recognize only a few moments in it which happened to me personally. What I see instead is a number of things my parents have told me. It covers roughly the same time span as their lives--my father was born in 1899, my mother in 1915, and the story's earliest event, narrated by Nelson's father, Vernon, takes place some time in between these two dates.

A couple of the things they told me are large enough fragments to constitute a story but most are just brief anecdotes that I've altered and woven into a larger pattern. There are two scenes in "Holier Than Thou" which I heard as larger chunks of narrative, substantial stories that indicate something of the contours of lives. Carl's narration of Nelson and him washing their feet in their father's pail of drinking water is closely modelled on events from my mother's childhood. It was a stepfather in her case, and there were several children instead of two, and it was the oldest one, not the younger one, who came up with the footwashing idea. But the gist of the story remains the same: the helpless children, unable to exact physical or even verbal retribution on their violent father, devise a way to vent their fears and frustrations that can perhaps best be summed up as gritty. The other scene I mentioned is also modelled somewhat closely on a story my mother told me about a friend of hers disastrous second marriage: Nelson's impromptu sermon on the evils of television. Something of this sort really did happen; and it was this story, and wondering about the intersecting life stories coming together to create such a scene, that more than any one thing was the seed of the character Nelson. I do not know another thing about the real life man or his marriage. I certainly never met him.

Most of the other characters and events I recognize from real life in the story are memories that I refer to as scraps or notes--not substantial enough to merit the word "story," these are often single images or brief incidents that for some reason have hung around in my mind (or files) for many years. For example, I recall from childhood hearing of a drunken neighbor who, in a fit of anger, killed a litter of puppies by throwing them against a barn wall. From firsthand experience I remember the preacher who drove up and down the highway playing and/or singing hymns through some sort of loudspeaker (I don't know what he had). The practical joke about cleaning out the mud puddle with someone's pants seat is an anecdote I've heard my father tell many times about someone he knew long ago. The old man with the motorcycle helmet and a jacket covered with religious slogans is someone I saw in a grocery store a few years ago. And the country store nicknamed Loafers Glory, mentioned in a couple of places(1,2), is the name of an actual place I saw once along the highway.

As for the influence of my reading on this story, that's sometimes a harder thing to spot, but I do notice a few instances. The disjointed narrative told by Dean, Nelson's young son, shows traces of my admiration for Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. My feeling is that in fact it should be more disjointed than it currently is--it becomes too regular and coherent as it progresses, sounding more like the voice of an older child than I intend. In a more general sense, the use of multiple narrators is likely influenced by Faulkner, though of course many writers use that technique. More recently, as I've rendered "Holier Than Thou" in to a hypertext in the last year, my readings of hypertext fiction and theory and my Web-surfing have played a definite role in some aspects of the story's presentation. As I mention in its introduction, although I had heard of Netscape's client pull feature before, Stuart Moulthrop's "Hegirascope" was where I first saw it in practice in fiction, and I knew immediately it was the sort of effect I wanted for the image clusters. The idea of the navigational map was influenced not only by the plentiful image maps on the Web, but more importantly by the spatial representations of some of the Eastgate fictions written in the Storyspace software. Without having read those first, one could read much hypertext fiction on the Web without having the spatial structure of a hypertext brought directly to one's attention.

Always, of course, the influence of the technology is lurking. Because "Holier Than Thou" is somewhat of a hybrid, a story-in-progress for print whose course I redirected, the engagement with hypertext is not as full as it might be with my future work. Even so, a number of things changed becaue of the electronic environment. As I describe elsewhere in the history of the story's development, I finally decided I just didn't care in which order readers encountered the various narrators. This would have been difficult to arrange in print (But not impossible. Interested readers should see Bolter's discussion of Marc Saporta's 1962 fiction, Composition No. 1, which consists of 150 loose pages which the reader may shuffle and read in any sequence. Bolter 1991, 140-42)

This still leaves most of the story unaccounted for. Most of the people in the writing group I was in when I first began writing this story, including me, thought that the characters May and Dean had the most authentic, believable voices of any of the narrators. I cannot account for their existence in any direct way. Not only do I not know of any actual person with whom them have a one-to-one correspondence--I cannot even associate any significant detail of their narrations with anything from my life. It is an incomplete story, maybe never to be finished; but these two characters come the closest to evoking something beyond words, to seeming like people. What's curious is that they are the two characters who are most completely the products of my craft. They completely textual constructions that, for what reason I don't know, I have simply kneaded more thoroughly than I have some of the others.

Some five or six years before researching any of these etymologies or, for that matter, thinking of "writing lives" or hypertext, I wrote the scene in which Nelson's young son, Dean, looks at his mother's hands in the dough and flour, and sees them as muddy (clay) and dusty. He then conflates two thoughts he's presumably heard from his Bible-quoting father about man being formed from dust from the ground and needing more than bread for life into the thought that "Dust caint live on bread alone." It would seem that on some level, long before I consciously make a connection, I already linked kneading, shaping, with the idea of bringing something to life. And yet that shaped thing--the bread, the text--is not sufficient and complete in itself. The words refer to more than themselves; they do, in fact, construct other languages that give fiction its power to convey, in Greenberg's and Schachterle's words, the richness of felt experience. For example, in discussing Theodore Dreiser, one of my favorite writers but also one who is often criticized for his poor handling of the English language, the critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren wonder why his best fiction still has the power to move readers:

"Words are what we have on the page of a novel, and words are not only a threshold, a set of signs, but a fundamental aspect of meaning, absorbed into everything else. Words, however, are not the only language of fiction. There is the language of the unfolding scenes, what Dreiser, in the course of composing the novel, called the "process and selection of events," the language of the imagery of enactment, with all its primitive massiveness--the movie in our heads, with all the entailed questions of psychological veracity and subtlety, of symbolic densities and rhythmic complexities. We are trying here to indicate something of the weight of the this language, or better, languages, as an aspect of Dreiser's art." (Brooks, Lewis, Warren, 1897)

To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does. (Ong, 82)

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Version Notes

Initial release: May 1, 1996
Last update: July 28, 1996