singing in a house with plaster walls

When I was a kid I had a big book full of Aesop's immortal fables. Forget everything you know about sour grapes and golden eggs. This book had every fable the man ever wrote in it. Fables that never would've made it into a fifth-grade classroom or a kid's television program: fables which dealt with nasty things like grave robbery, diarrhea, big scary lions, crucifixion, shipwrecks, exploding frogs, and the like.

I loved that book. I sure wish I knew where it was. I'd probably get an even bigger kick out of it now than I did back then. It was unabridged, you see. It wasn't really a kid's book. Some dry wit had translated it right out of Greek in a clipped, academic fashion. Many's the time I had to stop and look up a word, or puzzle my way through a rather sinuous turn of phrase. But I understood most of it. Each page had the full text of a fable printed on it, and, italicized underneath, the moral. There were some fables which didn't pass muster, of course. Aesop believed that people's personalities could be judged from their physical appearance, and as we all know, that just ain't true (except in Disney movies). But most of them taught good common sense, and demonstrated it in a rather captivating way, which is why I was so hooked.

The very first fable in that little book was one I didn't heed at the time, because I hadn't yet realized its relevance. Later on, though, it came back to me, and it's recurred to me again and again over the years. Particularly now, as I shall tell you. But first, the fable. I'm afraid I don't remember what it was called. But it went something like this:

There was once a talentless singer who used to practice in a house with heavily plastered walls, which amplified the sound so much that the fellow imagined that he had a first-rate voice. But when he went up on stage to perform, he sang so badly that the audience chased him off the stage with catcalls and vegetables.

And so we see that the disparity between how good we think we are and how good we actually are is often greater than we care to admit.

That wasn't the moral. The moral in the book was shorter and more profound. But you get the gist, right? Seems like every time I read something new, my eyes get opened to a new aspect of writing—and invariably, I hope to incorporate it into my own scribbles. William Faulkner has drawn my attention to the most debilitating defect of my current novel (and my new WIP, second in the series): Voice. The voice in my writing bothers me. It's so...remote. Third-person omniscient the P.O.V. may be, but as everyone from Jules Verne to J.K. Rowling to Douglas Adams to Mark Twain has proven, you can write in third person and still have a personal, lively, engaging voice. My novel manuscripts are anything but. The writing is sterile. Formal. Distant. Puerile, too. It's as intimate as a chastity belt, as approachable as a porcupine.

I suspect this is the chief reason why I'm having such difficulty writing this second book, and why I had such tremendous difficulty with the first, which, as I've mentioned, went through something like 27 versions and took four years to complete. I'm not having fun when I'm writing this crap.

Say, this reminds me of a song. Namely, Frank Sinatra on "I Get a Kick Out of You":

My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case,
When I'm out on a quiet spree,
Fighting vainly the old ennui...

The story is good; the premise is there; heck, the dialogue could be worse. Even the tone is starting to shape up. But the voice is awful. There's nothing there, no spark, no flash, no touch, no soul-to-soul resuscitation. Everything's leaving me totally cold, and I find myself, once again, "fighting vainly the old ennui."

I've got to fix this. I'm not getting a kick out of my writing. I need to relax and write the way I feel like, and worry about how it sounds later. I've got to settle back, get down to basics again, just have fun with the process of creating. Faulkner reminded me of that. Granted, The Reivers is told in first person, but still—the way it's written literally sucks me into the story. It gets me engaged, makes me a part of the world I'm reading about.

A little while ago, I read a quote on The Sharp Angle from an author who figures his (or her) writing is good because he (or she) becomes immersed in the tale he's (or she's) telling. It feels like the characters are real, and that sincerity comes across to the audience. Maybe that was that ancient Greek singer's problem. He wasn't sincere enough. He thought he sounded good bouncing off the plaster walls, but up on stage, it was a whole different ballgame.

I need to muster up some sincerity. You should, too, if you're writing. If you like what you're doing and (even more importantly) know what you're talking about, it'll come through in the writing, and you'll have a decent work on your hands. That's my other problem: ignorance. I've got some research I really have to do, quite a bit for both novels—historical research. I need to know a little bit more about what Wild Bill Hickok did with himself before he became a sheriff in Abilene—namely, his days of scouting and trailblazing. I need to know a little bit more about Nitenryu, the two-blade style of swordsmanship which the great Japanese duelist Miyamoto Musashi practiced. I've got a lot I need to find out about the ancient Akkadians. What they wore, the weapons they used in battle, just exactly how their subjugation of Sumer went, that kind of thing. The Epic of Gilgamesh was good, but it wasn't much on historical detail. Once I get some hard facts (and some other, more nebulous ones) confirmed, I'll feel a lot more confident about the quality of the work. Thus it'll be much easier to get personally invested and calm again.

And somewhere in between, I've got to remember to go outside and play fetch with my dog Harriet every now and then. A doughty challenge, but as I'm starting to learn, challenges look a lot smaller after you've passed 'em. I chronicle these thoughts not to complain, or hedge, or equivocate. I'm not fishing for compliments, or hoping to garner the sympathy of an electronic support group. You can take away whatever you want from it. This is for me, you might say. Years from now, when I'm an accomplished novelist, I want to remember these years of youthful insecurity, those long hours I devoted to a labor of the heart whose success was anything but certain. I suspect I'll laugh. Hard.

Now, if you want a real piece of poetic justice, the word "music" (which is central to the fable I related earlier) is a derivative of the word "muse," originating with the Nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the patronesses of intellectual and artistic pursuits. ...like writing, for example.

So tell me, why should it be true that I get a kick out of you.