Singing the words to fill in the blanks, and carve the excess | MARK HUGHES COBB
Sing the words: best advice I've ever gotten about writing. That came from one of the earliest real-writer (anyone who's not me) interviews I conducted, as a young paperboy. The first was with T.E.D. Klein, for the Crimson White, when that writer founded and edited Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine. Nerd, unabashed.
This author was someone I'd not read, prior. Aileen Kilgore Henderson wrote largely for kids; not surprising, given she worked as an elementary school teacher. But she had lived differing lives, long and well, up to her recent death at 102. You can read about her, and early Tuscaloosa, in "The World Through the Dime-Store Door," completed when she was 99. I interviewed her for that book in 2020.
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Couldn't find the earliest interview with Ms. Henderson, as it predates the Internet, or at least our archives. I didn't know enough to ask for help, being young, dumb, and full of, um, beans. The teacher in her volunteered (I'm paraphrasing, from a 25-plus year-ago afternoon): "Say your words out loud. Sing them if you can. You'll hear what doesn't belong." Hmm, Shakespearean iambic pentameter sings. She might be on to something.
Until thinking of her the other day, I didn't realize: I've been doing it ever since. Mostly in my head, which I realize doesn't sound out loud, but if you see me at a coffee shop muttering in the vicinity of a laptop, that's what's happening. Her advice, living on.
Every novelist, playwright, poet, songwriter, from those I've interviewed, I've asked two common questions:
Can you teach writing? It's relevant to even lit-stars such as Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris and Audrey Niffenegger, as they've supported lives through teaching, or held visiting posts.
A: You can't teach writing; but you may be able to teach writers.
It helps to be born with writerly tendencies: Harrowingly vivid memories; a slash of Roderick Usher's oversensitivity; a smattering of awkwardness that traps racing fancies inside, as Third Thoughts lecture you that, like the Heat Miser, you truly are too much.
And don't forget the tendency to edit (in your head) not just texts, but overheard conversations, traffic patterns, flower beds, movies and TV shows, up-the-gut running plays on first down, murders of crows, sandwich condiments, talks you suffered 20 years ago that still eat at your heart; waves and wind and light.
If not born that way, invest 10,000 hours of Ouroboros over-thinking; jiggle that neurosis bubble toward plumb.
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What's the secret? Even from those segued out of journalism, such as Neil Gaiman, Kathryn Tucker Windham, Rick Bragg, Winston Groom, Tim Dorsey, and Mark Childress, or out of performing, such as Fannie Flagg, or from an odd-jobs life like Christopher Moore, who worked as a roofer, grocery clerk, hotel night auditor, insurance broker, waiter, photographer, and rock 'n' roll DJ, the A, in essence:
Ain't none.
There's no such thing as a muse, except as metaphor, or face-saving interview topic when a writer forgot to thank a significant other in print.
Writers write. End of story.
So to speak.
Writing's the secret to writing. And reading. If you've met someone who thinks they can write, yet admits they rarely read, congratulations, you've met one of the metallic counterweights who droops the average IQ down to 100, in spite of the plethora of self-confessed geniuses you also have the misfortune of crossing.
The same folks, with no interest in theater or film, think they could act. Hey, I believe I could be a rocket surgeon, but until I put in 10,000 hours sculpting at NASA, no one's letting my scalpel near their propulsion systems.
Hannah put it thus: BIC.
The scratchy, cheap pens? Does the grim struggle to flow the ink in graceful lines, overtaking the usual splotches and Rorschach spills, somehow align thoughts and images?
"No," he drawl-growled, and yes I broke several Elmore Leonard rules there, for comedic effect, I hope. "No, the BIC method: Butt. In. The. Chair."
I metaphorically bit my tongue so as not to blurt BITC, or PYBITC, with the "put your" understood.
"Shut up," he explained.
There's no sub, no shortcut, no magic; nothing up your sleeves but arms, at the termination of which you'll find working digits.
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I wasn't around to know Hannah during his years at the University of Alabama. Tales of blasting bullet holes in his MG to leach out rainwater, firing a shotgun through walls to accommodate stereo wiring, and shooting an arrow through his old Tudor home on Caplewood, to prove a point — not that at the end of the shaft — are at least somewhat true. True enough for legend.
Students who tried to peace out on an impromptu flugelhorn concert were given pause by Chekov's pistol, as Hannah intoned “Now this is some bad soul. You guys had better learn the difference.”
The drink, he gave up, for the last many good years of his life, and the muse — it amuses me to contradict myself -- never absconded. He wrote, friend and colleague Phil Beidler said, as birds sing and fish swim: "His narrators are just poor, dumb-luck, befuddled, but god, they got hearts full of love."
So butt in chair, sober up if you must, guide characters as they seek, and fall in love, over and again, every day and forever. Then someday you might write a sentence pungent as Hannah's "In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista."
Another master from our back-leaning sister state, another fella with strong Alabama connections, Brad Watson, wrote about his mentor and teacher for a collection of essays published as "A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah." Brad wrote that even Sober Barry didn't deny drinking and writing worked, for him, even as it spun anguish for all around. Still, Hannah wrote the astounding stories for his 1993 "Bats Out of Hell" book stone dry.
Brad wrote about Hannah's instruction methods, which drove many a prospective writer mad, in both senses. Students crave star coordinates. Unlikely. But you can guide, spot errors, encourage when they're risking, be tough ... or go easy, and leave them flailing.
Hannah "... had no use or patience for boring work, whether from someone with talent or without much of it, especially when he was so immersed in his own work or trying to get there. If you were willing and able to get into and stay into the ring with the man, if you realized it actually was a kind of fight, a fair fight but a fight, and not a beauty or popularity contest or an exercise in the application of balm to the ego, you were okay."
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I talked with Brad, rest his soul, just months before his shocking, sudden death at 64, taking the opportunity of his appearance in Don Noble's "Alabama Noir" collection to call up a guy I'd once run around with, some. On the title page of my copy of his award-winning story collection, "Last Days of the Dog-Men," he wrote, "To Mark, with admiration." When I read that inscription later on, I was too flabbergasted, to as-ever leaden under imposter syndrome, to call and ask "For what?"
Writers read, even when writing. They can run up to a long view, even while narrowed in on the page. What Brad meant may as happily be best left to my imagination. I don't have the chance to ask him now.
Pinning it down would require euthanizing a thought, isolating a kindness, flash-freezing a generosity of spirit.
“Out here (Laramie, Wyoming), that’s all you’ve got: vista. We’re in a wide valley, 40 miles, bordered by snowy mountain ranges," he said, as we talked states, of mind and border. He told Hannah tales, thinking the man hated him, only to meet up years later and discover another gentleman, one who no longer needed to subsist in that blurred burgundy zone to write.
Brad, a teacher, offered guidance: “I get a sense of the main character’s – or characters’ – world, and how they fit in that world .... After that, it’s almost as if the structure of the book is gonna follow.”
How do we fit the whole in? Sing. You'll hear, eventually, what's not there.
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Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Writing advice: Singing the words to fill in blanks | MARK HUGHES COBB
