Lonesome Pine

Beginning a voyage into the land of the solitary talesman

I would like to continue to explore one of the topics I touched on yesterday – namely, what it means to tell tales when no one hears you.

I don't believe that I've seen any texts or textbooks or even any articles that discuss this. Everything that I read about the craft of writing assumes that the writer wishes to be read. He wants and needs an audience, and desires either fame or fortune or both.

And yet (as I noted yesterday) all of us talesmen begin our careers without an audience. As children, perhaps, we make up tales and stories, daydreaming fantasies to get us through the day. Moreover at a more basic level, we all dream – and every dream is a story we tell ourselves. Many people carry on diaries and journals as a means of self exploration and psychological healing perhaps.

We also tell ourselves tales without even realizing it. I mean by that that we reconstruct the events of our day that most trouble us, and narrate to ourselves a new version of events which makes the good things better, and justifies our actions while vilifying the actions of our perceived antagonists and enemies.

Most of us who wanted to be writers were in the beginning voracious readers. We read and enjoy so many stories that we began to want to tell our own stories, which would combine all of the elements of the best tales that we love, while correcting all the flaws that we thought we saw in them.

The plight of the solitary writer is one that I think will be touching more and more of us in the near future of America. This is a country which boasts of fewer and fewer readers and more and more writers. It is a country whose literacy rate is declining, and his people admit in nationwide polls that they read for pleasure less every year.

Just look at the numbers – hundreds of thousands of books are written, fewer and fewer are read.

Who is the Lonesome Pine?

He is most likely not a `he' at all – most likely the Lonesome Pine is a woman. I presume this is so because more women than men read fiction and so it's likely that more of them enjoy tales and would therefore want to tell them. I will not speculate on any basic psychological differences between men and women although it stands to reason that they do exist because the structures of our brains differ between men and women. But I imagine that there is a lot of common ground that both men and women Lonesome Pines share.

The Lonesome Pine stands on a bluff in the wind high above scrub country in the late afternoon, in the last light of day. It looks out over the distance, trembling slightly in the wind, and it imagines what might have been in that barren landscape far below in the distant past or in a possible presence or in a potential future.

The wind whispers through the needles of the Lonesome Pine. And no one hears those whispers but the Lonesome Pine itself.

The tales you tell yourself may serve all the general purposes of tales you tell to others. They may amuse, entertain, shock, excite, thrill, chill, arouse, exasperate, taste bitter or sweet. But they may do more.

The process of telling yourself tale is an interactive one. You are constantly gathering feedback, both as reader and writer, both as composer and audience. The reader in this case knows everything that the writer knows, just as soon as the writer knows it. It is therefore difficult to surprise the reader, without attempting to play tricks on yourself (perhaps unconsciously).

I wonder: does the Lonesome Pine need the illusion that he has an audience? Or does he need to face the truth, that he doesn't have an audience, and never will.

I don't know the answer to that one. I'm going to have to think about it for awhile and contemplate this whole issue a good deal longer.

(Composed by dictation Sunday 21 September 2008)

The Shape of Print

What we see on a page is not as it has always been

Sometimes, when I’m dictating into voice recognition software, I forget to include some punctuation – earlier today, for example, I was putting in commas, periods, and parentheses and dashes just fine, but for about a page I forgot to note where any of the paragraphs began or ended. The result was simply a great blob of text.

This put me in mind of a couple of things.

First, it struck me that there are no paragraphs in spoken tales. And second, it reminded me that in the beginning, there was no such thing as a paragraph.

I speak here of the evolution of European printing. In the Middle Ages, before the printing press was invented, the monks of the abbeys did make books, binding separate leaves together between covers. Each single folio was rather expensive – under some conditions, each page was made from a single lamb’s skin. The complete edition of the Bible, running a few hundred pages, would have necessitated slaughtering an entire herd of baby lambs. Not only that, but each page was written on only one side as I understand it.

The ‘real estate’ of the manuscript page was, therefore, going for an extremely high premium. Every square centimeter was like gold. The monks in the scriptorium therefore, did their best to ‘pack’ every page with as many words as they could – while keeping their strokes large enough so as to be legible.

Every page therefore was a complete ‘block’ of text. There was no punctuation, no paragraphs, no indentation. Instead, whole sections of text would be demarcated by an illuminated majiscule.

Later inventions included not only the printing press, but also paper, whose manufacturing secret Marco Polo brought back from China. In the centuries that have followed since then, paper has become cheaper and cheaper to the point where mass-market books could be sold for an extraordinarily small sum of money. Even though these are cheap, they still take advantage of several innovations in the art of printing – or rather, the art of laying out the page.

Today, we are accustomed to seeing:

• sentences separated by periods
• and marked off with capital letters at their beginning
• other innovations include parenthetical asides
• and notes set off by dashes.
• Paragraphs are indented
• or (in the case of HTML markup) additional leading between the lines.
• Dialogue is set off by quotation marks.
• Sections are either numbered
• or set off by blank lines
• or, when sections end at the bottom of the page,
• with a blank line and a series of asterisks
• or some other ornamental mark.

And of course, we also have lists:

1. definition lists,
2. bullet lists,
3. enumerated lists.

We set off larger sections of texts with chapters: each chapter begins on a separate page, usually under a header with additional whitespace at the top of the page. We also have even larger sections called ‘parts’ or ‘books’ each of which contains more than one chapter.

All these assist us readers to ‘decode and decipher’ the page very rapidly and easily. Could you imagine a newspaper without columns, headlines, paragraphs, or punctuation? A nightmare to read.

(You can get an idea of what this might be like by looking at the bottom of this blog post, or I take the entire posting and, while keeping sentence punctuation intact, eliminate all paragraph-level distinctions.)

Now, as to that first point...

An oral storyteller has none of this at his command. He doesn’t have capital letters, small letters, periods, semicolons, dashes, page breaks, bullet lists, blank lines, whitespace, or any of the other devices that printers and publishers have developed over the centuries to make it so easy for us to read printed text.

Instead, the oral storyteller has other arrows in his quiver. He has tone of voice. He can inject pauses in between words, phrases, that vary considerably in length – a longer pause will indicate not only a more dramatic point in the story, but also a break in organization of thought that is larger than a paragraph.

A paragraph ends with a longer pause than that which ends a sentence. A section ends with an even longer pause, a chapter uses a very very long pause, and the section of the story which is larger than a chapter will probably be told at another sitting.

The oral storyteller has other tools he can work with as well.

If he is sitting down, he can stand. If he is standing up, he can sit. He can gesture with his arms. He can turn his head or his whole body. He can look away from his audience, and he can look back at his audience. He can take a pull at his pipe. (George Burns used to remark that the cigars that he smoked on stage were his best friends for controlling the timing of his comedy routines.)

The oral storyteller can walk about, and do other physical actions that really take him into the realm of the stage actor or performer. He can whisper – declaim – shout – speak slyly and suggestively – boastfully – angrily – laughingly.

But if we are interested mainly in the sound of the storyteller’s voice alone, we must set aside all gesture and physical actions, and instead think only of the voice: both in terms of the timing of phrases as well as the delivery of words and lines.

If I’m going to dictate my stories aloud the way Raymond Chandler did, my stories will tend to suit oral storytelling better than written storytelling – both for myself and is the author and four my readers/listeners.

If on the other hand, I were to write my tales out on a keyboard or longhand, the result would suit better the written model both for myself and my readers. When read aloud, those tales might not sound very good, or make much sense, or be as effective as they would be if I had composed them from the beginning orally.

(Composed by dictation Saturday 20 September 2008)

---

Sometimes, when I’m dictating into voice recognition software, I forget to include some punctuation – earlier today, for example, I was putting in commas, periods, and parentheses and dashes just fine, but for about a page I forgot to note where any of the paragraphs began or ended. The result was simply a great blob of text. This put me in mind of a couple of things. First, it struck me that there are no paragraphs in spoken tales. And second, it reminded me that in the beginning, there was no such thing as a paragraph. I speak here of the evolution of European printing. In the Middle Ages, before the printing press was invented, the monks of the abbeys did make books, binding separate leaves together between covers. Each single folio was rather expensive – under some conditions, each page was made from a single lamb’s skin. The complete edition of the Bible, running a few hundred pages, would have necessitated slaughtering an entire herd of baby lambs. Not only that, but each page was written on only one side as I understand it. The ‘real estate’ of the manuscript page was, therefore, going for an extremely high premium. Every square centimeter was like gold. The monks in the scriptorium therefore, did their best to ‘pack’ every page with as many words as they could – while keeping their strokes large enough so as to be legible. Every page therefore was a complete ‘block’ of text. There was no punctuation, no paragraphs, no indentation. Instead, whole sections of text would be demarcated by an illuminated majiscule. Later inventions included not only the printing press, but also paper, whose manufacturing secret Marco Polo brought back from China. In the centuries that have followed since then, paper has become cheaper and cheaper to the point where mass-market books could be sold for an extraordinarily small sum of money. Even though these are cheap, they still take advantage of several innovations in the art of printing – or rather, the art of laying out the page. Today, we are accustomed to seeing sentences separated by periods, and marked off with capital letters at their beginning; other innovations include parenthetical asides and notes set off by dashes. Paragraphs are indented or (in the case of HTML markup) additional leading between the lines. Dialogue is set off by quotation marks. Sections are either numbered or set off by blank lines or, when sections and at the bottom of the page, with a blank line and a series of asterisks or some other ornamental mark. And of course, we also have lists: definition lists, bullet lists, enumerated lists. We set off larger sections of texts with chapters: each chapter begins on a separate page, usually under a header with additional whitespace at the top of the page. We also have even larger sections called ‘parts’ or ‘books’ each of which contains more than one chapter. All these assist us readers to ‘decode and decipher’ the page very rapidly and easily. Could you imagine a newspaper without columns, headlines, paragraphs, or punctuation? A nightmare to read. (You can get an idea of what this might be like by looking at the bottom of this blog post, or I take the entire posting and, while keeping sentence punctuation intact, eliminate all paragraph-level distinctions.) Now, as to that first point... An oral storyteller has none of this at his command. He doesn’t have capital letters, small letters, periods, semicolons, dashes, page breaks, bullet lists, blank lines, whitespace, or any of the other devices that printers and publishers have developed over the centuries to make it so easy for us to read printed text. Instead, the oral storyteller has other arrows in his quiver. He has tone of voice. He can inject pauses in between words, phrases, that vary considerably in length – a longer pause will indicate not only a more dramatic point in the story, but also a break in organization of thought that is larger than a paragraph. A paragraph ends with a longer pause than that which ends a sentence. A section ends with an even longer pause, a chapter uses a very very long pause, and the section of the story which is larger than a chapter will probably be told at another sitting. The oral storyteller has other tools he can work with as well. If he is sitting down, he can stand. If he is standing up, he can sit. He can gesture with his arms. He can turn his head or his whole body. He can look away from his audience, and he can look back at his audience. He can take a pull at his pipe. (George Burns used to remark that the cigars that he smoked on stage were his best friends for controlling the timing of his comedy routines.) The oral storyteller can walk about, and do other physical actions that really take him into the realm of the stage actor or performer. He can whisper – declaim – shout – speak slyly and suggestively – boastfully – angrily – laughingly. But if we are interested mainly in the sound of the storyteller’s voice alone, we must set aside all gesture and physical actions, and instead think only of the voice: both in terms of the timing of phrases as well as the delivery of words and lines. If I’m going to dictate my stories aloud the way Raymond Chandler did, my stories will tend to suit oral storytelling better than written storytelling – both for myself and is the author and four my readers/listeners. If on the other hand, I were to write my tales out on a keyboard or longhand, the result would suit better the written model both for myself and my readers. When read aloud, those tales might not sound very good, or make much sense, or be as effective as they would be if I had composed them from the beginning orally.

The Three Paths of a Talesman

Three ways to study, three ways to learn, three goals, three endings – all of them different.

Let’s say you want to be a writer. To be a writer means, to be someone who writes. This is the basic level: the only requirement is to write.

Now, let’s say you want to be a published writer. To be a published writer means, to be someone who writes, whose writing is accepted for publication by an editor, and his writing is then subsequently actually published and made available for sale to the public.

Now, let’s say you want to be a famous writer. To be a famous writer means, to be a published writer whose works sell in vast quantities and are, therefore, well-beloved by the reading public.

Now, let’s say you want to be an acclaimed writer. To be an acclaimed writer means, to be a published writer whose works are admired by a critical and scholarly (if not academic) elite.

The difference between being a published writer and a famous writer in this context, is only one of degree: the works of the famous writer sell more copies than the works of his not-so-famous colleagues. Therefore, for the purpose of this blog post, we can lump together the published writer and the famous writer.

This leaves us with three kinds of writer:

1. The writer (with no further clarifications)
2. The published/famous writer
3. The acclaimed writer

If you just want to be a writer (with no further clarifications) then all you need to do is write. You don’t need anyone else’s approval. You don’t need to study with any teacher of writing. You don’t need to publish what you write. You don’t need to satisfy any requirements of any editor, publisher, literary critic, or reader.

Just write.

I believe that most writers begin their apprenticeship or their practice of being a writer in this way. We tell ourselves stories. We write down our stories. And in doing so, we seek to satisfy no one but ourselves – at least at first.

Many writers will not end up being completely satisfied with this state of affairs. In the end, they will want their stories to be read by others – and they will want their readers to enjoy reading these stories. This usually means publication, with the ultimate goal of being rich and famous as a writer. Perhaps I ought to say ‘rich or famous’ – some would-be writers dream more of fame while others dream more of riches.

Either way, in order to be a rich writer or a famous/acclaimed writer, the writer needs first to be published.

Now everything changes for him. Now, truly, he will need to study other writers, he will need to police editors, he will need to satisfy the requirements of literary critics, and he will need to appeal to readers in general. In order for this to happen, he will first need to be published – and this means writing a work that some editor finds worthy of publication.

Two avenues diverge here: the first leads to acclamation, and the second leads to money. The difference lies in the whole approach of writing.

In today’s market I would say – at least from my small experience of it – that the kind of writing that wins critical acclaim is not, strictly speaking, talesmanship. I mean by that that the story is not what’s important, but rather it’s word selection and felicity and ingenuity of phrase. The line is what counts, not the work as a whole. At best, to work as a whole is examined as an exercise in style or as a psychological profile of a character or as a mood piece.

The best teachers that I have found for teaching writers how to write to be published, and therefore to be published writers (not acclaimed writers, mind you, but ‘professional, journeyman’ writers), are literary agents. The how-to books on writing that have been put out by literary agents manifest an awareness of the art of writing, the craft of writing, and also the desires of the literary marketplace and his editors and publishers understand them. These books by literary agents strike an excellent balance between the needs of the writer and the demands of the publisher. The balance is a fitting one, since the agent’s role is to go between writers and publishers.

Most writing courses in academic institutions will teach you (or will attempt to teach you) how to write for critics, with the goal of being an acclaimed writer. Therefore, if your goal is to be a published writer and perhaps even a famous writer, I advise you to avoid all such courses of study. Instead, choose any literary genre that you enjoy reading yourself, and study intensively all the examples of the genre you can find – with emphasis on the best-selling ones. If possible, take a work that has sold well and that you particularly like, and copy it out by hand word for word – from beginning to end. Do this for at least a half dozen works, preferably by at least three different authors.

After this, what you must do is write, review what you have written with a critical eye – an eye towards what seems to be the preference of publishers – finish what you have written to the best of your present ability, and submit it. Reading trade publications such as Writer’s Digest will also help, although all the most important thing is this cycle: write, finish, submit – and repeat, over and over and over.

An entirely different path opens before you when you seek to be a writer, and not necessarily a published writer. Today, you can self publish to your heart’s content and distribute your work over the Internet free of charge.

This path requires no study from anyone at all. All you need to do is write and to satisfy yourself. This path will lead you down a road of your own idiosyncratic preferences and aesthetic tastes. The work that you will do may not fit anyone else’s idea of quality. It may not fit anyone else’s idea of a story. It may not fit anyone else’s idea of literature. It may, in fact, he looked upon as incomprehensible gibberish. Or, it might be hailed as genius. It might be deemed publishable. You might get offers to publish it by reputable houses (such things, though extremely rare, have happened) and you might even become rich and/or famous.

(I must stress, however, that this solo path is not to be undertaken with any sort of goal, dream, expectation, or even hope of being acclaimed, famous, or published in any traditional venue. Anyone with any serious or even slight intention of achieving those goals really ought to study one path or the other.)

These thoughts occurred to me and talking to an old friend who is looking to move from journalism and screenplay-writing into fiction. I was trying, ill-equipped as I am, to give him some advice as to what editors and publishers seem to like in today’s writing styles. And it occurred to me that his short stories, which seem both cathartic and self-revelatory, even autobiographical, might well be hurt and damaged if he distracts himself away from touching the raw nerves, real emotions, and poignant memories that are his subject matter, with any kind of consideration for literary critics and/or publishers put on their lists of what is required, preferred, and acceptable in writing today. Maybe, it occurred to me, my friend ought to seek the solo path and right for the sake of expression and healing rather than being acclaimed, rich, or famous.

(Composed by dictation Friday 19 September 2008)

Unmoving Pictures

In which he is forced to recant his earlier proposal.

In today’s paper, I read an article about music videos that were being posted to YouTube. These videos were created by fans and artists alike, and consisted of the song underneath a single still image of the performer, or perhaps a montage of images of the performer. The rap star ludacris was quoted as saying that the result allow the viewer to focus more on the music in a more pure form – all I could think of, was that it sounded like some kid in the 1970s staring at the album cover while listening to the song.

So, it seems that my brilliant invention has already been invented, and for many of the same reasons – the ease, quickness, and cheapness of producing it.

But in the meantime I have been forced to reconsider my position. It suddenly occurred to me that there are some moments in movies that have the greatest power of suspense, and many of these moments take place in near total silence, or with only a slight ambient track playing. In these moments, no one listening to the soundtrack alone would have any idea of what is going on – or, if we did have an idea, we would not experience 1/10 the amount of tension, fear, or involvement. In order to convey a what is going on and to achieve a similar rise in tension on the soundtrack would necessitate words – and would kill the effect of the visuals alone.

At the same time, there are actions and scenes that happen in a radio play that heighten tension and suspense precisely because we cannot see what is happening. A good example of this can be found if you compare the radio and film versions of the story Sorry, Wrong Number. Here in this story, a woman who claims to be an invalid and confined to her bed overhears a telephone conversation in which her husband arranges for a murderer to come to the house and kill her later that night. The movie version is an excellent example of classic film noir, and yet the radio version – precisely because we cannot see what is going on – forces us to imagine what might be happening outside the woman’s bedroom, where she herself can’t see anything.

These considerations lead me to conclude that I was wrong: any stand-alone radio play used as a soundtrack underneath images might be a great radio play, but not so great a movie. Or conversely, it might be a mediocre radio play and a very good movie.

My position right now is that anyone attempting this new form ought to plan out both versions from the beginning, and allow the versions to diverge wherever one approach would make a stronger movie and the other a stronger radio play.

This modification of the plan might invalidate the entire process, and basically turn my new form into nothing more than a radio play with illustrations – or, as my friend Tim called it, “a film strip.”

(Composed by dictation Thursday 18 September 2008)

I Talk It Types

An update on voice-recognition training

It's now been about three weeks since I started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking (version 9) voice-recognition software. Herewith an update.

For a blog post like this, the accuracy of the program is excellent: I would guess that it runs well over 90%. The other thing that I use the program for is to dictate handwritten drafts of old stories, so that I don't have to type them in, but I'll still get a digital copy. Since my writing involves strange words, archaic sentence structure and usage, the accuracy of the program is a good deal less with this material – I guess it runs about 75 to 80%.

I find that I have definitely changed the way I speak (at least when I dictate to the microphone) and as a result, my throat gets a little sore if I dictate too much in a day. I'm not sure if this is because I'm straining when I talk – trying to speak more clearly and enunciate more clearly than I ought to – or whether it's just that I'm not used to speaking so much, so long, without a break. I keep trying to remember to have some liquid nearby to take a sip now and then – every minute or so – so far I don't remember to do so, but I would advise anyone trying voice-recognition software that this is probably a good idea.

Another bit of advice for anyone who wants to try the program is this: use it every day. Use it for at least half an hour every day. At first, you'll find that it takes longer to do any given task with voice recognition (which includes time spent training and correcting mistakes) than it would to do the task your usual way. I expect it will take at least two weeks to gain proficiency sufficient that, using the program will be just as fast, if not faster, than doing it in your normal manner.

One problem with the software is that the manufacturers don't allow you any trial, to test the software and see if it really will work for you. I believe that the company Nuance which manufactures Dragon NaturallySpeaking has on their website an online demo, which you can play with to get some preliminary idea of how well the program might work for you. But I don't know how extensive the test would be for you – it certainly can't compare to using the real program on your own computer for half an hour each day for two weeks.

The program is also fairly expensive, so you really have to have a good reason to want to invest the money and the time to find out if it's good for you or not.

Here are some things that would make it more worthwhile for someone to use the program: first, anyone with repetitive strain injury or RSI and carpal tunnel disease would find that the voice-recognition software gives his hands and fingers a good break, and allows him to continue to be productive without further risk of injury. Second, there are other people who find typing difficult. When the winter comes, I keep my house so chilly that my fingers get quite cold when I'm typing for long periods. So I look forward this winter to being able to keep my hands tucked away, nice and snug and warm, while I dictate to the voice-recognition software, and it does the typing for me.

Today I boosted the amount of RAM in my computer, doubling it to 2 GB. I have been running into the problem where the voice-recognition software would tell me that it was running out of memory, so I hope that this is going to fix that. So far today, I have not yet noticed any appreciable boost in speed in the program. (For the record, I'm dictating to a Toshiba laptop running Windows XP with an Intel core duo CPU clocked at 1.6 GHz.) One thing I'm not sure about, is how raw clock speed in the CPU multicore chip helps the program work better. I believe the minimum requirements for version 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is the version I have, specify a 1 GHz CPU, and recommend 2.4 GHz clock speed. 1.6 GHz falls roughly halfway between 1 GHz and 2.4 GHz, but this is a mobile chip, so it might not be as powerful as the corresponding desktop chip. If we take the two cores and multiply 1.6 times two, we get 3.2 GHz, but I have no doubt that neither Windows XP nor Dragon NaturallySpeaking can 'see' both cores and use them to their maximum. I doubt the two cores running at 1.6 GHz do much better than 2.0 GHz – but I'm no expert in this.

As another one of my 'blind' experiments, I'm dictating this blog post without looking at the screen. I find that this works faster in speaking because I don't have to bother with checking to see if the program made any mistakes. On the other hand, whatever mistakes it's making, will be twice as troublesome to correct, because I'm going to have to go back over the entire blog post and reconstruct what I meant in the cases where the software atrociously misinterpreted my mumbles.

One other thing to consider is how fast I can compose while speaking aloud, compared to writing, whether that means writing out in longhand or typing on the keyboard. I'm not really used to telling tales out loud. Moreover, I find I have to put part of my attention into the simple act of speaking clearly, always with part of my mind considering how well program might be interpreting what I'm saying. This another difficulty also: that is that you have to be speaking out punctuation, which is different from the way we just talk normally. I have to speak out loud and name every punctuation mark, and that does throw my concentration off a little bit. I expect – or rather at least I hope – that in time I'll get used to this, and it will become second nature. (The program does feature a mode of operation under which the program will interpret punctuation and insert it based upon the way you speak, so that you don't have to name each punctuation mark. I expect it looks at rising inflection at the end of a sentence – or at least what the program interprets as a sentence – and then it interprets it as a question and answer sessions with you? A short pause would be marked with a comma, and a longer pause would be marked with a period. (I had to type out the words, 'comma' and 'period' – because I don't know how to force the program to spell out the words, rather than typing the punctuation marks.) Of course the program has to know something about grammar in order to make probable guesses as to the words you mean, so, analyzing grammar would give the program a better idea of what constitutes a full sentence.

I would say that using the program for normal tasks – especially business-related tasks – would be much simpler, smoother, and quicker transition than using the program to dictate fiction or detailed scientific treatises. I believe there are more expensive special editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking geared towards medical or legal professionals which contain prepackaged vocabulary lists geared to those professions.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 17 September 2008)

And He Shall Bear No Name

The danger of a protagonist who goes unnamed

Recently, a friend of mine has been sending me some short story fragments of thinly veiled autobiographical sketches. In these fragments, he persists in refusing to name his central character.

This narrative strategy is an interesting, dangerous one. It becomes very interesting when identity is part of the subject matter or theme of the story. For example, Daphne du Maurier used this strategy to great effect in her novels Rebecca and The Scapegoat.In both these stories, the central character felt himself overshadowed by the spirit and personality of another character. By refusing to name the central character, du Maurier emphasizes this point: her central characters in these stories become ciphers, though in both cases the intention and effect is quite different.

I’m not sure what my friend’s intentions are in refusing to name his central character. But the strategy does get him into trouble sometimes, because the talesmanship it is at times unclear.

The first, and most basic difficulty this kind of strategy gets one into, is how to refer to the central character. ‘He’ or ‘she’ can refer to anyone in the story of that sex. When you have two or more men in a scene, and you say ‘he went to the bar,’ who is ‘he’? Is he him, or is he him? The pronoun ‘he’ refers to the last-named male character. But, unless the writer is very careful, he can trip himself up when he forgets who that last-named character is.

When the writer commits this mistake, it’s one of the most basic mistakes he talesmen can make. You never want to confuse your audience – not without a damn good reason. (And even a damn good reason is usually not enough.)

The name of a character is something like a tool in your work kit. If you don’t name a character, you are eschewing that tool. The result is something like a carpenter who decides ‘Today, I’m not going to use my hammer.’ Now, whenever the carpenter has a nail, what’s he going to use to drive it into the piece of wood? Should he pick up a ranch and try to use that? Or should he do without nails, and use a drill, a wood screw, and a screwdriver instead? All the time, that’s nice, most useful hammer is sitting in the work box grinning at him, taunting him, unavailable to him, all because he made the arbitrary decision that today he wasn’t going to use it.

The usual (and most-often used) strategy the talesmen use when they don’t want to name their central character is to tell the story using the first person point of view. That’s what Daphne du Maurier used in both Rebecca and The Scapegoat. The first-person pronoun is just as good as a name: each serves as a unique identifier for the character. But when the talesmen decides to change the first-person pronoun into the third-person, it’s not so simple as simply replacing every ‘I’ with a ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ or ‘her.’ Sometimes, the structure of the phrase has to be changed. Oftentimes, a couple of sentences have to be tinkered with, because the pronoun ‘I’ can’t refer back to the last-named character of the same sex, but can only refer to the narrator of the story. The pronoun ‘he’ on the other hand, does and will refer back to the last named male character.

In one of my stories, I tinkered with it for years, and at one point I decided that I wanted to tell the tale through the eyes of a minor character. So I went through the whole story and replace the third-person pronoun for this character with the first-person pronoun. This was very easy, and it never required me to change any other part of the sentence. In addition, the first-person pronoun has a strange and unsettling effect on the audience, rather like the direct address in the cinema or onstage which breaks the plane, the illusionary fourth wall of the theater. Suddenly the audience finds itself no longer safe as the voyeurs of the drama – now one of the actors looks at them, sees them, and addresses them directly. We are now part of the story, we are now, as it were, on the stage ourselves.

I rather liked the feeling that this change gave to the story, but after awhile I changed my mind again, and returned her to third-person. But now, changing back was not so easy. Now indeed, I had to look at the sentence structure and decide whether ‘she’ would work, and would make sense, and would be, above all, clear to my readers. I had to change a lot of sentences because of this.

My experience is probably the reason why I’m so sensitive to this issue, and why my friend’s slips stood out so strikingly to me.

Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted as saying, ‘The audience always has to know where they are in the story – even when they are wrong.’ This perfectly sums up the situation. The basic and first obligation of the talesmen is to be clear to the audience. Talesmanship is a subset of communication, and the rhetorical arts. The talesmen is always permitted to lie to us in the audience, and to deceive them – but even when he attempts this, he has to trick us in such a way that we think we know what’s going on, even though we have been deceived. Later on, when we find out how we’ve been tricked, we usually don’t like it, and only a great delight will make up for having been tricked and fooled.

So these are the lessons:

1. Always name your central characters
2. When you don’t name your central character, use the first-person point of view

Failing to follow these two simple rules will necessitate great care in telling your tale – maybe more care than it’s worth.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 16 September 2008)

Soldiers and Warriors

The dangers of a small volunteer army

I must confess to knowing nothing of what I speak today. I have never killed a man, nor donned a uniform, nor endured basic training. I have never taken orders, given orders, served in combat. I have never looted a conquered city, raped its women, burned its palaces. I have never been wounded in battle, nor crippled, nor killed. I have never won a medal, nor ordered men to march into certain death, nor been splattered by a friend’s brains.

Therefore, you may well ask, why do I dare to even broach this topic?

I dare because it is of the greatest importance. To the freedom and liberty of the citizens of a great nation, and the safety of its neighbors and the world.

Everything I have learned, or dared to learn, of combat and soldiering, has come to me through the tales I have read and heard and watched enacted. And it struck me that there is a deep difference between war stories told by men who have gone to war, and those told by men who have not; there is a difference between wars ordered and commanded by men who have not served, and those commanded by men who have served; there is a difference between the attitude of the populace towards its military whether that populace is made up of men who have served, or men who never served.

There is also a difference between the warrior and the soldier.

The warrior has existed since the first conquest. We can liken him to the chimpanzees, the young males who have no females to mount, who dare not fight tooth and nail against the dominant male, and who roam in small punk-bands about the edges of the clan’s territory. The warrior lives for plunder and loot. When he gets it, he calls himself a prince and gets to play dominant male himself, and mount all the females he fancies.

Most sports and athletic games are trials for youths, training to be warriors. In societies where warriors are allowed, they are honored, and boys dream of one day being warriors themselves.

The soldier acts out of duty (or orders) to defend his city’s interests, or advance them. His dream is not to be a soldier, but to be something else – or he takes to soldiering as another man takes to tinkering or tailoring or wood-cutting, as a trade.

In any society where most of the young men are put into the military, they become soldiers. In those societies where only a few of the young men enter the military, they become warriors.

Soldiers think of themselves as common men like any others.

Warriors think of themselves as an elite class, superior to the civilians for whom they feel disdain as weaklings unable to defend themselves, dependent upon the few, the proud, the warrior caste.

In the society where soldiering is the rule, most men out of the military have been in it, and they know it, inside and out. They know its foolishness, its bravado, its insanity, and its glory. They have no great love for the military and have no delusions as to the unsullied perfection of its soldiers; but they have a fondness for it, and some pity for the poor bastards at the bottom rungs of command. For the generals they feel only contempt – the same sarcastic contempt office workers feel for the top levels of management. Like management, generals take all the prizes, do none of the work, suffer none of the risks, and strut about spouting profane boasts in their own arcane lingo.

In the society where soldiering is rare, and hence only warriors fight, civilians know nothing of what goes on during the campaign; they only know what the generals tell them, and thus they believe all the generals’ lies. They worship their warriors, and think they are all moral, unimpeachable, just, right, fearless, unconquerable.

In every warfaring community (by this I mean the community of the military, whether of soldiers or of warriors) all newcomers must undergo a process of hazing. This is something known to fraternal orders of all kinds, at least in masculine society – I will not hazard a guess as to the initiatory procedures among the female societies. Among warrior castes, the hazing tends to be more informal and individual; among soldiers in armies, the hazing is professional, universal, and operates under formal strictures: it is known as basic training or boot camp.

An army of warriors is a collection of individuals, each striving for individual prizes of glory and loot. An army of soldiers is a mass, and must be soldered together into a mass. Basic training is the process whereby the individual citizens are made into that mass.

When the general gives an order to send 500 men into certain death, at issue is the success or failure of the campaign, perhaps the war and the polis itself. Whether any one soldier lives or dies is immaterial – perhaps not entirely immaterial, for the loss of each soldier lessens the total force the army has at its disposal for the next assault or defense – but what matters is the success of the campaign, the assault, the defense. If one out of every three soldiers dies, if the losses must mount so high to reach the hoped-for results of the generals’ plans, then so be it. The price must be paid.

Of course, this is not the outlook of the soldier who will be so immolated. He naturally would rather live. He will live, he will desert, he will flee, rather than get blown to bits.

Only the esprit de corps, the madness of the soldering that basic training has accomplished, will keep him a unit of his command, and not an individual man. Thus it is that the process of basic training is to destroy each recruit’s soul, break him, and remake and rebuild him as the brainwashed soldier, who will obey the order to cast himself into the fire, and who will do anything to preserve the integrity of his platoon.

It is a hallmark of a republic that it musters its armies from its citizens, as soldiers, who take up arms to defend their city, and put them down again when peace is won. It is a hallmark of an empire that it musters its armies from the few, attracting them with promises of loot and glory, exalts them to a false feeling of superiority, and wields these warriors for conquest – the conquest of faroff cities, neighbor cities, and even their fellow-citizens.

When a republic trades in its soldiers for warriors, it cannot stand as a republic for long. It will turn empire, with all the folly and ugliness that term brings.

And we will cheer our warriors, and imagine they are pure, and stalwart; and we will honor our generals, and imagine they know what they are talking about; and we will support our princes when they tell us conquest is defending the homeland.

And we will deserve it richly, when in due course of time, our warriors take up arms against our princes, and put the generals upon thrones, and take their loot from our own treasuries, and rape our sisters and daughters and wives.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 15, 2008)