A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic Read online

  Published by Trinity University Press

  San Antonio, Texas 78212

  Copyright © 2014 by Peter Turchi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  ISBN 978-1-59534-194-5 ebook

  CIP data on file at the Library of Congress.

  18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for Laura and Reed, for my mother and sister, and for my students

  To watch these shifting forms fall into order and balance—there is no greater joy than this.

  — CAROLE MASO, The Art Lover

  CONTENTS

  THE CONTEMPLATION OF RECURRING PATTERNS

  1 Directions for Attaining Knowledge of All Dark Things

  2 How, from Such Wreckage, We Evolve the Eventual Effect

  3 Seven Clever Pieces

  4 The Treasure Hunter’s Dilemma

  5 The Line, the Pyramid, and the Labyrinth

  6 The Pleasures of Difficulty

  SOURCES AND SOLUTIONS

  THE CONTEMPLATION OF RECURRING PATTERNS

  Endlessly retyped, [the novel looked] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as they labored . . . bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing.

  — MICHAEL KORDA, on editor Robert Gottlieb’s work with Joseph Heller on Catch-22

  Every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. This is true not only of a complex satirical novel but also of a Shakespearean sonnet, an autobiographical essay, a play or screenplay, a love letter, and an email to a colleague about a problem at work. Whom do we address? With what tone? How should we begin? What do we want the reader to think or feel or understand? Is it best to be direct or indirect, sincere or disarming? Should we start with a joke? A quotation?

  There are many different kinds of puzzles, but generally speaking, a puzzle is an array of material or information that requires a solution. Let’s say a woman has a job, she works hard, but at the end of the month she doesn’t have enough money to pay her bills. Circumstances have presented her with a puzzle, a problem to solve. She could take on a second job, or stop eating out, or rob a convenience store—all possible solutions—but instead she decides to write a letter to her employer asking for a raise. The composition of that letter is another puzzle. Should it be a demand or a request? How should she support her argument? Should she mention that she’s paying her mother’s medical bills? It’s a large company, very professional, so she decides she should simply state the circumstances, offering a few highlights of her excellent work and its benefits to the company. She deliberates over whether to issue an ultimatum (“More money, or off I go”) or to acknowledge her employer’s perspective (“These are difficult times, so if the budget won’t allow it now, maybe next year?”). She decides not to mention that she knows two less-experienced men in her office are being paid higher salaries—not yet, anyway. Has she chosen well, arranged all the pieces successfully? She’ll know as soon as she gets her response.

  A short story or novel is a different kind of puzzle; and it is more than a puzzle.

  The composition of a story is a puzzle for the writer, whose job is to decide what to include, what to exclude, and how to organize the parts. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as fiction writers, we begin to write without knowing precisely what we’re trying to create. The work continually changes form, and emphasis, and purpose. Characters disappear, new characters are added; some scenes grow longer, others are reduced to summary. A pocket watch that just happened to be in a dresser drawer suddenly seems to indicate something larger. We can’t truly solve the puzzle, or arrange the words and sentences and characters and events most effectively, until we finally feel confident that we understand what we’re trying to create.

  But while composing a piece of fiction is like assembling a puzzle, the finished work is not presented by the writer as a puzzle for the reader to solve. There may be puzzles within the story, elements of plot or character or imagery or meaning that require the reader’s active participation, but the story as a whole is not a problem with a solution. Like Ariadne’s thread allowing Theseus to journey into—and safely out of—the mythical labyrinth, a story means to lead the reader somewhere. But the destination isn’t a monster, or a pot of gold, or a bit of wisdom. Instead, the destination is something—or several things—to contemplate. The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder. How do we know that? Because the books and stories and poems that mean the most to us are the ones we want to read again, to reexperience and reconsider.

  Magic is an art very closely related to poetry. The poet manipulates words, and the magician manipulates objects. We are transcending reality in order to produce something poetic, something beautiful, something interior.

  — SPANISH MAGICIAN JUAN TAMARIZ

  The word “magic” is commonly used to refer both to a ritualized performance with a long history (the ancient Greeks wrote about magi, or magicians) and, more vaguely, to something transcendent that the speaker either can’t or would rather not explain (“That night in Venice was magic, just plain magic”). The history of magic is richly populated with scientists and mathematicians, inventors and entertainers, gamblers, thieves, and con men. Professional magicians tend not to refer to what they do as “tricks,” since that implies gimmickry—a trap door, a hollow pencil, a coin with a hole drilled through its center. The preferred term is “illusion,” which can apply to effects facilitated by a mechanical device (a trap door, a hollow pencil, a drilled coin) as well as to those facilitated by skill and practice (a playing card palmed on the back of the hand, a deck cut to the exact same card ten times out of ten), and to those facilitated by surprising scientific and mathematical principles. Many card tricks are based on simple but non-obvious math.

  THE FRONT AND BACK HAND PALM

  To begin with, the card is held between the tips of the middle finger and thumb.

  The first and little fingers now grip the card.

  The two middle fingers are next bent and brought down under the card and round to the front of same, thereby causing the card to revolve between the first and fourth fingers, as though on an axis, and assume the position on the back of the hand clipped between the first and second and third and fourth fingers (shown left).

  After considerable practice it will be found that all the movements I have just described will become practically one, and the card will apparently vanish from the hand.

  — Howard Thurston

  A magical illusion is a puzzle for the magician who, like that woman hoping for a raise, imagines an intended effect (a rabbit produced from a hat that appeared to be empty) and then organizes his materi
als, movements, words, and gestures to create that effect for an audience. In theory, the illusion is a puzzle for the audience, too (Where did that rabbit come from?). But the sort of person inclined to watch a magic show is the sort of person who, while understanding that there must be a perfectly mundane explanation for how the illusion was created, simultaneously hopes to be moved to a state of wonder—in the same way that a reader who picks up a new novel hopes to be transported by mere ink on paper, the arrangement of words on a page.

  The composer of a puzzle means to present a challenge, but also intends for his audience to solve it. A magician presents an illusion with the understanding that, while it can be “solved,” or explained, his purpose is to disguise that solution so we can experience something that, however briefly, transcends rational understanding. It’s tempting to say that a writer, then, is a kind of magician. A writer gives us a story not to provoke us to admire how it was produced, or to challenge us to tease out some hidden or coded message, but to invite us to think about something he or she has found worthy of extended consideration. But unlike a magical illusion, some of the most powerful effects of a story, poem, or novel actually do transcend rational explanation. Discussions of the writer’s craft, of conscious decisions, can take us only so far. There’s mystery in it for the writer as well as for readers.

  Puzzles are not solved by the use of accurate reckoning alone . . . but also by a substantial use of insight thinking [an admixture of imagination and memory]. Insight thinking does not emerge fortuitously or haphazardly. It comes about only after the observation and contemplation of recurring patterns.

  — MARCEL DANESI

  The writer’s craft is what we can study; and by looking carefully at the work that speaks most strongly to us we can, gradually, discern patterns, choices, and decisions we find effective.

  Our curiosity, our interest in problems, means that many of us get pleasure from writing that yields more each time we read or see or hear it. Happily, there are plenty of stories and novels that offer up both immediate pleasure and the rewards that come from prolonged meditation. The challenge for writers is to arrange information—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, images—in ways that are intriguing, arresting, curiosity-arousing, and illuminating. In any particular story, novel, or poem (or essay, play, or screenplay), we need to regard how we’re arranging that information, for whom, and why.

  That’s what this book is about.

  This book is not so much a sequel but a companion to Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Both books are, at least in part, about ways in which a piece of writing is designed. They both mean to invite writers to think differently about what we do. (That first-person plural pronoun is generally used to refer to writers, but also at times to readers, under the assumption that all writers read.) While the two books overlap in places, and some of the same authors are mentioned, I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary repetition. In Maps of the Imagination, it seemed useful to focus on the extended metaphor and to offer brief illustrations from a wide variety of writers. The topics contemplated here seemed better investigated by more detailed discussions. In several places I refer to visual artist Charles Ritchie, whose work and process served as initial inspiration. While the primary focus is on fiction, much of what is here could apply to any form of writing.

  The chapters that follow consider the tension between puzzle and mystery; the gaps and contradictions that make fictional characters nearly as complex as actual people; the writer as a magician, directing the audience’s attention away from himself and toward a created representative; the maze we find ourselves in when we try to follow the “narrative line”; and our desire, as readers and as writers, for challenge, as perverse as that sometimes seems. Appearing along the way are Jerry Seinfeld, Harry Houdini, Bruce Springsteen, The Wizard of Oz, Wassily Kandinsky, tangrams, famous Norwegians, reindeer hunters, and a disappearing elephant. You’ll also encounter a variety of puzzles, which can be ignored or solved; the solutions appear in the notes to each chapter. If you’d like to try your hand at the tangrams, you can cut out the pieces on the last page of the book.

  Art is often discussed as a form of play—and yet that playfulness, that sense of delight, is frequently absent from discussions of the writing process, and of what we tend to call “the work.” But even T. S. “You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy” Eliot was a fan of the Marx Brothers. No matter how serious the tone, literature offers pleasure in its construction as well as in its content, and in the ways it connects us to others. While it’s possible to forget, as we push ourselves to revise and improve, we write because both process and product give us—at least occasionally—delight. This book, then, is offered as a provocation, a companion, and a reminder of the joy writing offers.

  DIRECTIONS FOR ATTAINING KNOWLEDGE OF ALL DARK THINGS

  Creating order from chaos is the innermost room of a writer’s desire.

  — JOHN LE CARRÉ

  SOLITARY PLEASURES

  While fiction writers and their editors bemoan the relatively meager sales of literary fiction, and while poets wonder what they’re complaining about, there are other kinds of books that a large percentage of the population buy and put to use, but are reluctant to discuss. On any given day, in bookstores but also in grocery stores and in airports, hundreds if not thousands of books are purchased, nearly all of them inexpensive paperbacks, which the reader will give the rapt attention that, we’re told, ordinary men and women once gave the installments of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop or the latest J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker.

  These books that sell, well, wherever books are sold—and where aspirin, neck pillows, and beach balls are sold—are books of puzzles: crossword puzzles, double acrostics, word searches, cryptograms, and sudoku, the puzzle phenomenon that has had its grip on this country, among others, for several years. While puzzle books might seem to have nothing in common with fiction and poetry, many poets and fiction writers—however reluctant we may be to admit it—are also puzzle solvers and game players. (Some claim, adamantly, not to be; if you’re one of them, we’ll get to you soon.)

  The Card Players, by Jonathan Wolstenholme

  The puzzles and games that intrigue writers take many forms. Years ago, when I became the director of an MFA program in creative writing, and before email became our default mode of communication, I had occasion to talk with the program’s academic board chair by phone almost every day. Our conversations would often go on for half an hour or more. One day, I recognized a sound in the background on the other end of the line. I started listening for it, and while I didn’t hear it during every conversation, I heard it during nearly all of the longest conversations, a sound familiar from my youth: the clatter of cards being shuffled, followed by the soft snapping of a game being laid out.

  When my sister and I were young, our parents and our mother’s parents played bridge several times a week. We sometimes watched and, as we got older, sat in for a few hands, but for the most part our parents’ and grandparents’ card playing served as background music as we did homework or watched television or played our own games. The rhythm of shuffling, the quiet shushing of cards being dealt around the table, and then the irregular falling and snapping of cards being played was as much a part of our lives as the rumbling of the refrigerator motor or the grumbling of distant lawn mowers in summer. Accompanying the rhythms of the cards was the melody of our parents’ and grandparents’ conversation. Actually, there were several melodic lines: the necessary bidding (“One spade,” “Pass,” “Two hearts,” “Pass”), the inevitable commentary on how the cards had been distributed (“Look at this mess,” our grandfather might say. “Good Lordy, Miss Agnes”) with stretches of silence as a hand was played, punctuated by “Ha! Chu devil” or “Hell tell the captain” (our father) or a disappointed “Shoot. Look at that” (our mother), then more boisterous conversation while our father tallied the score, someone shuffled, and our mother or grand
mother refilled drinks or brought out a bag of cheese-flavored crackers shaped like cartoon fish. We had strict bedtimes in those days, my sister and I, and I still have vivid memories of lying in bed, on the verge of sleep, listening to the voices drifting up from our dining room, the game going on into the night.

  That’s a long way of saying that listening to my colleague playing solitaire summoned up fond old memories. Finally, one day, I acknowledged that I could hear the game. I said something like, “How are the cards?” She must have been surprised: she cut off a laugh, and stopped. I never heard her shuffle again. I imagine—though I never asked—that she suspected I might have taken her playing as a sign of inattention, or distraction. And maybe it was. But I have come to believe there is a clear link between the habitual consideration of the strategic arrangement of playing cards and the work we did together.

  This colleague of mine was a poet, with a ferocious ear for form and music. She was also quite a remarkable organizer. For instance: for the program’s semiannual residencies, we had to arrange workshops for about seventy students. The students were separated into seven groups. Each student’s work was discussed once during each residency. Two faculty members led each workshop each day. Each student participated in one of these multiday workshops five times over two years. Most people would simply divide the students into groups and pair up the faculty more or less randomly. But my colleague treated the challenge as a puzzle, for which she created the following rules:

  1. At any given residency, no faculty member could lead any particular workshop group more than once.

  2. No two faculty members could be paired together more than once in each residency.