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

  Robert Boswell has compared meaning in fiction to lightning bugs in a yard—they can be attracted, but not manufactured. The words, phrases, sentences, images, and scenes in poetry and fiction are arranged deliberately to create a particular effect, to lead the reader on that journey toward contemplation. It’s one thing to tell us that a man is on an island; something else to tell us that he’s been stranded for a year, and will do anything to get home; something quite different to tell us that he’s being held captive on that island; something different still when we learn his captor is a beautiful woman; and that something starts to become The Odyssey when we’re told that our mortal hero is being held prisoner by the goddess Calypso, that Athena will intervene to enable his departure, that he’ll make it back home, but that he will suffer mightily along the way—and all that is conveyed in dactylic hexameter. In the opening of Homer’s epic, suspense about whether Odysseus will make it to Ithaca is virtually eliminated; instead, the focus is placed on his trials and adventures along the way and after he arrives.

  Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, contemplating a newly barred bank

  Decisions about what information to release when, and how, are important to all writing. While it became an enormous commercial success, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a very unusual western. The opening of the film had to prepare viewers for a story that portrays outlaws as heroes, despite the fact that they spend most of the movie running from the law, all the way to Bolivia, where they are murdered. Among other things, the screenwriter, William Goldman, had to convey that the two men are very well known by reputation, and feared; yet he also had to indicate that their time is ending, and to prepare the audience to accept the fact that the main characters would die in the final scene. So the film opens with various shots of a bank closing for the day, with an emphasis on heavy doors and locks and security. When a dismayed Butch Cassidy asks what happened to the old bank, which was beautiful, a guard says it kept getting robbed. “That’s a small price to pay for beauty,” Butch responds, introducing the film’s bittersweet tone, humor wedded to loss. The next scene focuses on the face of a blond-haired man sitting at a card table as the man he’d been playing accuses him of cheating. When Butch comes in and addresses the blond-haired man as Sundance, his accuser immediately turns anxious; and when the accuser asks, “How good are you?” Butch dives out of the way as Sundance shoots the holster off the man’s waist, then shoots the man’s gun out of the holster and across the floor. In addition to demonstrating the Sundance Kid’s particular expertise, the scene establishes the character, who was not nearly as well known a historical figure as Butch Cassidy, and simultaneously the actor who plays him, as at the time Robert Redford had nothing like the fame of Paul Newman. The scene also introduces the bond between the two, apart from the rest of the gang, which prepares the viewer for their long journey together. The casual moviegoer is unlikely to think about what information is being presented, and how, and why; but those decisions have their intended effect, nonetheless.

  Joseph Heller said that one of his motivations for writing Catch-22 arose from two conversations he had with veterans of World War II. One of them told raucous, entertaining stories about his time in the service; the other said he couldn’t see how anyone could find humor in war. While the novel is known for its comedy and manic, Who’s-on-first-style dialogue, Yossarian, the main character intent, above all else, on staying alive, has suffered a terrible shock. His insistence on self-preservation isn’t simply instinctive; it’s a response to a horrific death he witnessed. While his discovery of Snowden’s catastrophic wound offers at least a partial explanation for Yossarian’s behavior, it also causes potential problems for the writer. If the death were described in all its gruesome detail at the beginning of the novel, it would be difficult to persuade the reader to think anything about Yossarian’s situation is funny; but if the death were withheld until late in the novel, it would seem like a cheat—a crucial bit of information unjustifiably denied to the reader. So instead Heller tells us early, almost casually, that Yossarian witnessed a death, then mentions it again at least half a dozen times, adding information each time, until finally we get the entire story (which still has a surprising turn). As a result, we accept the comic tone of the early chapters even as we anticipate something darker. Heller’s selection and arrangement of information about Snowden’s death is one of the novel’s defining structural features.

  RULES WE GIVE OURSELVES

  Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

  — LEONARDO DA VINCI

  The correlation between certain types of puzzles and, say, forms of poetry is fairly straightforward.

  Sudoku—a puzzle that adheres to the following constraints:

  • It must be a nine-by-nine grid.

  • The grid must be further divided into nine three-by-three squares.

  • Each cell in the grid must be filled with the numbers 1–9.

  • No number may be repeated in any horizontal line.

  • No number may be repeated in any vertical line.

  • No number may be repeated in any three-by-three square.

  • The puzzle composer omits certain numbers, and those omissions allow for one unique solution.5

  Villanelle—a poem that adheres to the following constraints:

  • It must have nineteen lines.

  • The nineteen lines must be further divided into six stanzas.

  • The first five stanzas must be tercets.

  • The final stanza must be a quatrain.

  • The poem must have two refrains.

  • The poem must have two repeating rhymes.

  • The repeating rhymes must be in the first and final lines of the first tercet.

  • The rhymes must repeat alternately in tercets two through five.

  • The quatrain must include both repeated lines and both rhymes.

  Night in Three Panels, by Charles Ritchie

  Of course, this isn’t to say that the tasks faced by the puzzle composer and the poet are essentially identical. The puzzle composer’s only responsibility, in the case of sudoku, is to create a functional puzzle (though some composers are much more ambitious). The poet’s task is not simply to fulfill the requirements of the form but to use it to create something unique and beautiful. The point is that, to the extent the formal poet begins with “rules,” or constraints, she has a container to work in and against. While fiction writers may not have the benefit of pre-defined forms (there are no rules for the short story that come near the specificity of the rules for the villanelle), every writer has the option, in every story or novel, to create his own rules, his own form.

  If [my method of organizing my research into thirty folders] sounds mechanical, its effect was absolutely the reverse. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated only the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.

  — JOHN McPHEE

  Visual artist Charles Ritchie’s work is tightly bound by constraints. For a large part of his artistic life, he has focused primarily on what he can see from his home studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. He has recorded a few simple objects dozens, even hundreds of times. They include the houses and trees he can see through his windows, those windows themselves, a streetlamp, an astronomical chart, a vase, and a few chairs. Over time, these objects have become iconic. The repetition of subjects has also allowed him to record both minute and dramatic changes.

  Other constraints he chose include working almost exclusively in black and white (“Contrast and atmosphere can accomplish so much on their own,” he says. “Why encumber them if it’s not necessary?”); with the exception of his self-portraits, depicting no living creatures (“too loaded”); omitting as much as
possible, often by depicting objects in fading light (“Night filters things out,” he says, “it creates powerful negative space.”); and executing his images on a scale so small that they are essentially private, available to one viewer at a time. Many are no larger than a postcard. He means to offer the viewer “an invitation to crawl into an intimate yet immense universe.”

  Night with Terraces, by Charles Ritchie

  These constraints can be amended, bent, or even ignored whenever he chooses; but as general guidelines, they have provided the form for his art. His constraints are not necessarily evident to a viewer of the work, any more than the constraints that went into the creation of an equitable workshop are evident to the student in the workshop. The viewer of one of Ritchie’s images has no need to know what informs the choices he’s made. From the artist’s perspective, the purpose is to provide boundaries, a container for creative expression. In order to focus our attention on a problem, or task, we can impose restrictions that free us to focus on its essence.6

  WHERE WE DWELL: THE VIRTUE OF OBSESSION

  Well, I’m like that [repressive and obsessive] all the time. It’s sort of where your OCD comes in handy. You’re a dog with a bone and you’ll just gnaw on it until it’s right. . . . But the level of intensity and the demand that it accompanies—thank God, everybody was young men at the time because it demanded your twenty-four-hour fealty. Because I had no life, I didn’t think you should have one either [laughs]. And so it was all music, music, music, music, music. . . . We’ve learned how to . . . bring the same sort of intensity and get the job done with a little bit less craziness. But at the time it was important, and madness is not to be underrated. Madness in the appropriate place and at the service of an aesthetic ideal can help you get to higher ground sometimes.

  — BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  Several years ago, Charles Ritchie chose to devote his few weeks at an artist’s colony to printmaking, something he hadn’t done much of on his own. When he opened his studio to visitors, the prints he made were tacked to the walls. None of them had turned out the way he hoped. Someone else might say that his experiment in printmaking had failed. But Ritchie saw the images as opportunities to contemplate which aspects of the printmaking process he could control, and how, and which aspects he couldn’t. More than that, he saw the “failed” prints as opportunities to reconsider what he thought he had wanted in the first place.

  Back home, he transferred one of his images, roughly the size of a record album cover, onto a copper plate, in order to make prints. Preparing the plate meant re-creating the image in reverse, and in negative, using a doctor’s scalpel to shape the copper to hold the ink. The process took nine months. That patience and perseverance, combined with his dedication over decades to his chosen constraints, is evidence of an artistic obsession, one increasingly at odds with the pace of modern life. None of us can observe the entire world that intently; daily we find ourselves paying partial, casual, or superficial attention. This sort of specialization is common in the sciences, where, according to the naturalist E. O. Wilson, even today one could devote a productive career to the thorough study of everything living at the base of a single tree. But in art, many of us fear repetition, or what might appear to others to be repetitious. In the same way that a scientist or mathematician might devote herself to a single problem, question, locale, or species, though, we might devote ourselves to a particular circumstance, a particular type of character, a particular moral dilemma, or a particular form. The virtue of obsession is the power of a narrow focus combined with ongoing investigation and deep contemplation. Like Thoreau’s writing about Walden Pond and Wordsworth’s poems about the English Lake District, the product of devoted attention encourages us to rediscover the virtues of a meditative relationship with our world.

  The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what separates artists from entertainers.

  — John Updike

  We’ve all heard—and possibly given—the advice “Write what you know.” But that implies that one knows quite enough. And while it may be true, as William Maxwell said, that at a very young age he had all the material he would ever need as a writer, having that material wasn’t enough; devoting obsessive attention to it was what yielded So Long, See You Tomorrow, among other books. So the better advice might be, Know what you write. And know it as deeply, as comprehensively, as possible. Then acknowledge the remaining mystery.

  I dwell in Possibility –

  A fairer House than Prose –

  More numerous of Windows –

  Superior – for Doors –

  — EMILY DICKINSON

  It may go without saying that there is a dark side to obsession. Simply being obsessed is no virtue, and obsessive-compulsive disorder can be crippling. In his memoir Elsewhere, novelist Richard Russo tells the story of his mother’s paralyzing obsessions, and the extent to which he recognizes something similar in himself: “Somehow, without ever intending to, I’d discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness . . . to my advantage. Call it whatever you want—except virtue.” Obsessive devotion to work may not be a virtue in the moral sense, but it benefits the writing. To complete a book of sudoku a day would be to miss most of the finer things in life, and we routinely remind ourselves of the dangers of watching too much television, spending too many hours on Facebook or Twitter, or indulging an addiction to a simple game. Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century technology seems to have exposed a cultural vulnerability to obsessive game playing (from FreeCell to Minesweeper, from Temple Run to Candy Crush Saga, to whatever has replaced all of those by the time you read this), and while someone can no doubt argue persuasively for the intellectual, psychological, neurological, and physical benefits of same, it seems likely that on our deathbeds we will regret having spent so much of our time passing time. Even writing every day is not necessarily a virtue if we do it thoughtlessly, or mechanically. The various challenges to write a poem a day or a novel in a month might provide motivation to type, but combining words is an intermediate goal, not the ultimate one; we want to express something, we want to communicate, we want to produce something meaningful to ourselves and to others. Cal Ripken Sr., father of the famous baseball player, used to tell the young men he coached, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” In art, the ongoing engagement with both material and process is our practice.

  I’d always lose the audience there. . . . I was obsessed with figuring it out. The way I figure it out is I try different things, night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point, or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait.

  — JERRY SEINFELD, on getting a joke right

  There is no shortage of examples of writers obsessed with their material. Edmund Spenser devoted over a decade to The Faerie Queene, and Walt Whitman continually revised Leaves of Grass, essentially making a book of his life’s work. John Updike was obsessed with marital politics, and with particularly American themes; three of his novels are reconsiderations of The Scarlet Letter. In novel after novel, Thomas Bernhard wrote about despair, suicide, and the impossibility of perfecting a work of art. As readers, we’re glad Mark Twain kept yearning for his youth, so wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi. We’re glad Proust didn’t grow weary of his lifelong project, but instead wrote into the night even as his illnesses were killing him. But obsession isn’t uniquely linked to longer works. Kathleen Spivack writes of Robert Lowell, “Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, and other friends of Lowell’s sometimes were fed up with his constant questioning and revision of each line. He was obsessed with a poem while working on it and demanded the same attention, or obsession, from others.” Marianne Moore published her poem “Poetry” in six different versions ranging from three lines to thirty-nine. Tim O’Brien has examined and reexamined, in his stories as well as in novels, the effects on the individual
of war in general and of Vietnam in particular.

  To truly dwell in the possibility of our work is to favor the considered life, the penetrating gaze. Our obsessions spring from a source we can’t identify; or their origin is obvious yet inescapable; or we choose them. We might feel confined by them, or enraptured; in either case, they focus our interest and attention the way a magnifying glass focuses the heat of the sun.

  Most writers who produce an extensive body of work do so as a result of obsessions that they have. . . . As we grow older the meanings of our obsessions gradually change, and mature as we mature. Some of the pain goes out of them and understanding enters, perhaps. So, we return to our obsessions and we reshape them. We reshape ourselves as we write.

  — ROSS MACDONALD

  CULTIVATING THE PUZZLE INSTINCT

  We don’t typically think of obsession as something that can be willed. To be obsessed is to be possessed, consumed, overtaken. Can artistic obsession be learned, or taught?

  In terms of content, probably not—though it isn’t uncommon to be led to recognize an obsession. The writer looks at a draft of a new story only to find it feeling familiar—or gives it to a trusted friend who says, “This is like that story you showed me last year, except this time the sisters are cousins. Which, come to think of it, is a lot like your story from two years ago, where the sister characters are the two neighbors.” As the friend goes on, excitedly making connections, explaining how every story the writer has ever written can be boiled down to yet another depiction of her relationship with her sister, the writer begins to despair.