Elements of Story

Last time, I posted the basic idea of the Finding Your Story workshop I teach at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, including my thoughts on what I call “the heart of the story.” A couple of past participants suggested I share some of the other story-writing principles I talk about, so here we go...

Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.

I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette  of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):

1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.

2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.

3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.

By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.

Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.

In The Maltese Falcon, the shenanigans involving the pursuit of the black bird (the physical plot) occupy most of the screen time and generate most of the specific scenes. They’re fun and provide a lot of great moments, but they’re also confusing and ultimately not even that important to understand. The emotional and moral story of Sam Spade himself, though, is powerful: a compromised man, sleeping with both his partner’s wife and the woman who turns out to have murdered said partner, comes to realize that there’s still a code of conduct in this dirty world, that “when a man’s partner is murdered he’s supposed to do something about it.”

Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.

And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.

These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.

Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.

It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.

In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.

For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.


***


At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”

Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”

A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.

That can be tragic: he wants to dismiss the Sphinx’s prophecy and live the life he desires, telling Fate to go screw herself and living by his own will, right down to killing the king of Thebes and marrying his widow. But what he really needs is to learn to respect this Fate. Because she’s always going to win.

The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)

The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.

Usually a happy ending comes because a character figures out what he needs instead of what he wants just in time to change events and attain what he needs. In the best tragic endings the character figures out the same thing—but just too late to change events and get what he needs.

George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.

Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”

Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:

1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).

2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).

You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.

In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.

In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!)
 One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.

Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.

In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.

You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.

Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.

That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story:  try starting at the end and plotting backward.

Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.

Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.


***


“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.

The Heart of the Story

I teach a workshop at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto called “Finding Your Story,” the basic idea of which is to help people dig through the clutter, confusion, and anxiety of writing to find what they’re really trying to say and the best way to say it. These are the notes I start the work off with and keep coming back to over the eight weeks of the class...and that I keep rechecking at myself, because one of the traps of this writing business is how easy it is to forget the basics while navigating all the little details.

For starters: you can’t know how to say it unless you know what you’re saying.

And if you really want to know how to say it, it’s best to know why you’re saying it. If you’re writing to communicate—that is, hoping someone else reads it and gets something out of it—then you probably want to bring something to someone that they’ve never known or thought about or quite seen in that way before. Ask yourself who you want to be saying it to (roughly). But, even more importantly, ask yourself why it matters to you to put the time and effort into saying it.

Knowing what you want to say can be a lot harder than it sounds; when most of us come up with a story idea we’re not thinking in those terms. We usually start with a situation we want to capture or a character we want to describe or a plot idea we want to play with. But deep down, there almost certainly is something we really want to say. These ideas are speaking to us for some reason. The work of this class is largely about going inside to discover (or remember) that reason.

In order to find your story:

Simplify.

Find the heart of it.

See your story as one whole entity, not a series of events.

A good story is organic, not a structure of brick or timber. It’s one living thing, every cell growing from the original seed, and it needs all its components to keep it alive.

A story is also a river. Elements come together into a single course that carries us to its destination. It’s not a series of pieces, it’s a single flow. The substance at the start becomes the substance in the middle and then the substance at the end.

(Or, if you want to play with lame physics analogies, a story is like light: it’s a particle and it’s a wave, depending on how you’re looking at it at the moment.)

Your job is to discover that organism and that river. I say “discover” and not “create,” because when the pieces come together I usually feel as though I’ve unearthed something—or liberated something or breathed life into something—that was there all along. Our ideas, and the way they connect our scattered experiences, thoughts, and feelings, nearly always hold the implication of a story within them. The more I feel I’m inventing something, the more likely I am to be going off course.

Which isn’t to say that that you’re not going to be doing a lot of conscious creating and decision making. My gut feelings help me understand whether something works or not, but I usually have to do some thinking and analyzing to narrow my options enough for my gut to have something to work with. There’s a lot of “what if I try this?” before I get to “okay, right.”

Beware of thinking, though. It can be treacherous. Our thinky brains love to run and play, but sometimes they need to be brought back to focus. I’ve found that exercises like the ones I’m assigning to you help with that focus.

For that matter, beware of writing. Writing can fool you. Your own fun prose and clever inventions can distract you from noticing that you’re not sure where you’re going. A snazzy scene can pave over a gaping hole in your story—for the moment. Soon enough, though, that hole’s going to show up again.

So your first job, before you can simplify your story, is to simplify the job itself.

The most useful tool I’ve developed in my decades as a writer: anxiety reduction. And the best tool for anxiety reduction I’ve found—better than solitude, better than breathing exercises, better than Xanax, better than bourbon—is task reduction. 

One of the tricky parts about writing stories is that they contain so many elements that we can find ourselves trying to stay on top of ten things at once. Tone, structure, plot, character, voice, how we’re going to end it, the scene we’re working on, the scene coming up, and that scene fifty pages ago that still doesn’t feel right. Which summons those two unwelcome visitors so well known to every writer: confusion and anxiety.

Pick one aspect of the story to work on at a time. In this class, you get to work on finding the heart of the story and put all the rest on the shelf. For the moment, stop asking yourself how the story should begin and how much should be in flashback and how to make your protagonist more sympathetic and whether it’s going to be funny or sad. Those questions will still be there when you come back to them, and you’ll probably discover that the answers will be much easier to find once you understand your story better.

In fact, I’ve often found that a lot of those answers become not only easier but obvious. Now that I know what I’m saying and where I’m going, some choices become simply inevitable. Which is a wonderful feeling: one less thing to agonize over.

Which brings me, at last, to the first exercise: Try to tell your story in briefer and briefer forms without losing its emotional, intellectual, and thematic essence. You can lose plot mechanics and details of milieu—in fact, you’re going to have to—but keep your eye on the essence of what you’re saying. Start by telling it in under 200 words. Then bring it under 100. Then 50.

To keep this from getting too abstract, here are the “hearts” I’ve found in some other people’s stories, told in roughly 40 or 45 words. Mind you, these aren’t intended as literary criticism. I know they’re oversimplified. But I think they’ll help you get what I’m saying:

•    “A woman is so caught up in romantic dreams that she can’t appreciate her unglamorous but steady husband and throws herself into a disastrous affair that brings such disgrace upon her family and herself that she commits suicide.” (Madame Bovary)

•    “A boy who wants to feel worthwhile creates something that makes him a big deal for a while but then lets him down, forcing him to learn that he can only feel worthwhile by living his own life.” (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

•    “A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until they have to defend their nation from an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” (War and Peace)

•     “A people build a vast, secure empire but over time focus more on personal or otherworldly rewards and fail to teach their offspring civic virtues, so more and more of the running of the empire is handed over to foreigners who eventually pull it apart.” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)

•    “A man is abandoned by his lover and detaches himself cynically from human affairs. When she returns he learns she left him for a higher cause. He seduces her away from her cause, until through his love for her he realizes that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” (You know!)

Note that each one starts by telling you clearly who the story is about. (That’s usually one person, but stories can be about multiple people, or whole nations, too.) Then it tells you what the protagonist’s initial situation is, which usually means what’s wrong with his or her or their situation. Then it tells you what they try to do about it: affairs, superheroes, wars, foreign mercenaries, seductions. Then it gives you a sense of how that goes and where, through reacting—or failing to react—the protagonists end up.

Note also: these summaries don’t sound all that interesting. All the catchy twists and offbeat milieux, all the dazzling touches of the authors, have been left out. This exercise isn’t about writing a springboard or an elevator pitch or a back-cover blurb. Your boiled-down story not only doesn’t have to sound exciting, I promise you it almost certainly won’t sound exciting. I’ll even say that it shouldn’t, at this point. What it should sound is clear and solid.

In this exercise, don’t be afraid of simplicity. Simplicity is your friend.

In finished writing (as we’ve all heard a million times), it’s usually important to show more than tell. But for this exercise: tell, don’t show.

Don’t be afraid of your story sounding too familiar, either. The basic stories have all been told countless times and people will be telling them again forever. Good human stories will always feel as though we’ve heard them before. Which means your  summary may sound trite when you first read it. Banal, even. But no more banal than my summary of Madame Bovary, which isn’t bad company.

It’s what you ultimately do with the story that will make it new and unique. And you’re not going to think about that now, remember? It will be much less frightening to do something dazzling with a story once you’re very clear on what the story is, because then you won’t be freaking out about technique and content at the same time. (Anxiety reduction: your other friend.)

You’ll also note that these summaries all include the end of the story. Not the specifics. We don’t know that she swallowed arsenic, he admitted he was gay, Moscow was burned, the Vandals sacked Rome, and Louie rounded up the usual suspects. But we know whether our protagonists succeeded or failed in what they wanted and we have a sense of how they changed or what they learned.

So when you summarize, include the ending, as best you understand it now. You’re not marrying it; you may change it completely as your understanding grows. But you won’t really know your story unless you know where it goes. It’s the end that makes clear the meaning of the whole thing. It’s the end that determines what you’re saying to us.

There were two basic possible endings to Casablanca: Rick gives up Ilsa so she can help Laszlo; or Rick wins Ilsa away from him. Those two endings create different themes: a great cause matters more than any romance; or a great love matters more than any cause. They’re both worth telling. Just know which one you want.

The ending trumps everything else. You can have every character telling us that great causes matter more than romance, and countless moments throughout the movie supporting the same idea; but if Ilsa stays in Casablanca with Rick, then you’ve told us that, really, the romance matters more than the cause. If your ending doesn’t line up with the intent that’s implicit from the beginning, then  you’re not saying what you think you’re saying. And if you try to say contradictory things at once, your readers come away confused and dissatisfied.

(This goes back to what I said about the story as an organism. I’ve never found the “beginning-middle-and-end” description of stories very useful. Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning? And the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany?)

This exercise has multiple benefits. Boiling down will force you to decide what’s most central to the story and what’s more peripheral. In the course of that you’ll have to go deeper toward what your story’s really about. You’ll probably find elements that you thought mattered but turn out to have been distractions.

It will also usually reveal things about what you’re doing that you’ve tried not to notice. Like the fact that you have a ton of fascinating material, but you don’t actually know how it’s going to fit together. Or you have a great starting point but only a vague idea where you’re going from there. Or you don’t know who your main character is. Or you’ve been trying to convince yourself that the ending will take care of itself, but really you’re terrified of having to confront it. Or you know this setting or material is compelling to you but you don’t know why. Or you just plain have no idea what you want to say.

This will expose your weak spots. That’s a good thing. Go right at the scariest stuff. Don’t put off the part that makes you most nervous, expecting it to be easier later. It’s probably the most important thing you need to look at.

That doesn’t contradict what I was saying about anxiety reduction: it’s about feeling the fear actively as you work through the confusion that keeps stirring up the anxiety. It’s about feeling the bad stuff more intensely as part of the process that leads to dispelling it. (That’s why focused task reduction is better than Xanax. Or even bourbon.)

The exercise will also give you a document you can use. Once I have my 50-word (or so) description of my story, I keep it with my work and check it whenever I get confused about what I’m saying and why. Like a mission statement.

(A couple of former students have told me that they read their summaries every day before starting writing, as a focusing ritual and to keep themselves from getting confused in the first place. I haven’t been doing that, but I probably should.)

This short summary is that “heart of the story” I was talking about. The germ from which the organism grows. Bring your story down to this and then start building it outward, letting everything unfold from that essential story.

Write from the inside out.

Clean Boyish Sluggery

A few years ago, my pals Michael Chabon and Diana Schutz were editing a comic book called The Escapist, about the fictional superhero from the former's novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. They both liked my book on the early days of comics, Men of Tomorrow, and asked me to write a mock-historical essay about the original Escapist comics of the '40s, as if such things had really existed. It was a fun challenge, self-parody and parody of someone else's idea at the same time, so I decided I may as well just go into full-on mockery mode and make fun of a bunch of other writers, too. I liked how it came out, as did the Chabon and the Schutz and a smattering of readers.

       I was reminded of it a few days ago, as I was polishing a sequence in The Undressing of America about moral and intellectual attacks on junk culture—risqué stories of the '20s in this case. Rereading the thing, I found myself still liking it, so I thought it would be a good time to pull it out of the back-issue bins. You'll probably like it more if you've read anything about attacks on pop culture in decades past, and even more if you've also read either Michael's book or mine. But even if you haven't read either, I hope it's silly enough to provide a few minutes of...well...escape.


Escaping the Spotlight: The Escapist and the Press
by Gerard Jones
 

From the beginning, superhero comics have elicited reactions from journalists, psychologists, and pedagogues ranging from consternation to bafflement and all the way back to consternation again, providing us with a fascinating glimpse of America’s changing relationship with its heroes. Though much has been written about public reaction to Superman, Wonder Woman, and other icons, no full tally had ever been taken of the greater world’s comments on the Escapist until I researched my recent book, Men of Tomorrow. Regrettably, the lengthy chapter on the Master of Elusion had to be cut from the finished book in order to keep the price point below $27.00 (US) and thereby secure the support of Barnes & Noble’s buyer for Light Nonfiction, Sports and Hobbies. But I am pleased to be able to share some of my most illuminating discoveries here.

       Through what must be only an astonishing coincidence, the first two print mentions of our hero appeared simultaneously in very different publications. In the December 1940 issue of The Fiery Cross, in an article entitled, “New Deceptions to Insnare [sic] Christian Youth,” the Reverend Castigation Lemuel Bixbee noted, “Superman, Captain America, and the Escapist are but a few of the newest baubles dandled at the crossroads of Mongrelization by these Hebrew Deceivers.”  Interestingly, while accurately listing Sam Clay among “those sons of Abraham whose whore-spawn grace these ‘comic magazines,’” the Reverend describes Josef Kavalier as “an obvious Frenchman and therefore no less dedicated to the degradation of the Race.”

       That same month, the holiday edition of Midget Radio Monthly, a trade journal, advised readers to “Take a peep at the Excapist [sic], the latest trick from our own Shelly Anapol of Empire Novelties. Zowie, that ought to sell some midgets!  See you in the funny papers, Shelly!”
       Tom Mayflower would not have long to wait for his first extensive critical analysis.  In “A Stain on American Boyhood,” in the May 25, 1941 Chicago Sun-Times, book reviewer Sterling North (later revered as the author of Rascal) wrote, “Vile as these woodpulp excrescences are with their irrupting boils of lurid ink and mayhem, most ‘comics’ at least celebrate good old American fisticuffs.  We may take some comfort in knowing that the coming generation, bred to savagery though it may be by the likes of Captain Marvel, is at least being encouraged to settle its beefs with clean boyish sluggery. Now comes a new rat to the swarm, a ‘hero’ called the Escapist, to coax our Yankee young down the path of elusion. How will America stand up to the coming horde and hang a fat lip on the face of totalitarianism if our young men are being trained in the virtue of ducking low and slipping out the back like a souse about to be treed by his wife?”

       A year later came a more positive assessment from none other than William Moulton Marston, maverick psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman. “The Escapist,” he told an interviewer for Family Circle magazine, “captures that which is truest and sweetest in our modern children’s literature: the sight of the strong and willful man in tight clothing, regularly bound, trussed, fettered, chained, manacled, leashed, strapped, cuffed and hogtied. Surely no better proof could exist that every healthy young man dreams of nothing more avidly than images of captive submission—a lesson that all publishers would be shrewd to heed!”
       Five months later, folklorist and vibrator developer Gershon Legman, writing in the Freudian journal Neurotica, responded to Marston that the Escapist’s “masochistic constructs would seem rather to reflect the avid dream of Mr. Samuel Clay that the next generation is composed principally of buggerers and inverts like himself.” This appears to be the first public mention of Clay’s sexual preferences, which would earn him much free publicity a decade later thanks to the US Senate.
       But the most astonishing nugget of my literary diggings was this analysis from the great German culture critic Theodor Adorno: “Though promising ontologically an escape by the epistemic subject from the deception of constitutive subjectivity, this Elusion-Master in fact reconstitutes the escape fantasy as a commodity supportive of identitarian thought, so that in the dialectic of ‘Escapist,’ ‘captor’ and ‘victory’ social antagonisms are made both subject and object, and the archvillain is finally not the Mechanist but the category of reflection itself.” (From Wahrheitsgehalt und gesellschaftliche Darstellung als Bestimmte Negation und Selbstbesinnung des Widervernunft im des Überhelden als Kulturindustries Irrvolkshelden, never published in English in its entirety, although a portion appeared in the January, 1947 Readers Digest under the title, “If You Think the Movies Are Bad, You Should Read the Comics!”)
       Astonishing it was, for I, like other comics historians, had always believed that the great Adorno ignored our beloved medium entirely. According to correspondence found posthumously in the papers of Max Horkheimer, however, Adorno discovered comics while enduring the “Hollywood exile” shared by so many left-wing German intellectuals during the Second World War. Accompanying his colleagues Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg to a pitch meeting with Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox in 1943, he happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Escapist no. 17 on an end table and began leafing through it. Seized by the concept, Brecht and Schoenberg immediately began developing ideas for a Technicolor Escapist musical starring Don Ameche as the hero and Alice Faye as Luna Moth.

       The project might have changed the fortunes of the Champion of Liberation and his creators forever, had not Adorno, famed already for his impromptu intellectual virtuosity, leapt atop a cigarette machine and launched into a critique of superheroes as “fetishizations of contradiction that serve the exploitative needs of late capitalism,” which effectively smothered his friends’ enthusiasm. In the end they pitched Zanuck on a musical adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a vehicle for the ascending Betty Grable. When that project died in the face of objections from Fox’s star musical director, Busby Berkley (“I can’t be sure, D.Z., but I think those little Commies are trying to put something over on us”), Schoenberg lamented in a letter, “Bertie, we should have stuck with the superhero.” Alas that they did not. 
       The best known of all commentators on comics, of course, was the criminal psychologist Fredric Wertham. Although he neglected to discuss the Escapist in his classic Seduction of the Innocent (reputedly because an intern took the file copies home where they were mistakenly thrown out by his mother), Wertham did once credit the series with playing a vital role in his selection of comics as a field of study. In an article for The Ladies Home Journal in March 1952 entitled, “Why Your Child Will Probably Grow Up to Be a Homicidal Sex Deviant,” the doctor explained, “Once we held a violent boy in solitary confinement in our mental hospital. One night he pried the bars from his windows, escaped the room, and set fire to the premises. I asked myself, ‘Where can he have gotten this idea?’ It was then that I realized that, barely a year before, he had read a magazine entitled The Escapist.  The connection was undeniable.’”

       (Though it cannot be proven, it is likely much more than coincidence that this article was shortly followed by the memo recently unearthed in DC Comics’ archives by Robert Beerbohm, in which Jack Liebowitz enjoined editorial director Irwin Donenfeld that “Batman should never again be shown escaping from a trap,” suggesting “maybe stories about dinosaurs or space aliens instead.”)
       Mentions of the Escapist grew fewer thereafter, as the hero fell from regular publication and faded from popular memory. Readers will of course be familiar with Ken Kesey’s 1960s ruminations on the “Neon Escape”: “Kesey riding high in the shotgun seat with the meth freaks and acid heads unfurling like flags around him, rapping about Tom Mayflower slipping the bonds of the Iron Chain like Ornette Coleman slipping the bonds of tonality or Burroughs the bonds of sense, übermenschen of self-extraction vaulting through the nearest window to find themselves dropping past the edges of reality.” (Tom Wolfe, “Some Notions Are Better Than Others,” Esquire, May 1967.) And who among us has completed a year of college without being required to read literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s psychosexual investigation of Kavalier and Clay’s work, “Come Back to the Raft and Untie Me, Tom Honey”? 
       But in the years to come, even as mentions of him grew more numerous in dittoed, stapled fanzines, to the press at large (with the exception of a single story from the March 17, 1971 Beaver Falls Trumpet & Clarion headlined, “Pow!  Zap!  Biff! Local Lad Sells Old Comic Book for $50!”) the Master of Elusion ceased to exist. And perhaps this is the ending our hero would choose. For being held to the judgments and interpretations of others is surely a form of bondage, and what else should the Lord of Escapism do but slip the snares of the world’s attention?
       (I have heard mentions of a minor novel based on the early lives of Kavalier and Clay published some time in the past five or six years, but as it sounds like little more than an ambitious fan project I haven’t yet put the energy into tracking it down. Any reader with information on this book or its author, however, is welcome to pass it along.)

-----------------

Gerard Jones is the author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books), described by one commentator, for a modest fee, as “the definitive history of comics for our time.”
   
   

The Next Book

As I've been editing The Undressing of America I've been thinking about what to write next: there's my idea for the book about online communities and changing concepts of privacy, and the one about the pop-cultural history of romantic love, and the follow-up to Killing Monsters and media violence. But I can shelve the thinking for a while, because the next book has arrived like a gift.
       Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, granddaughter of the man who founded DC Comics and, at least to a great extent, created the American comic book and planted the seeds of the graphic novel, is writing a book about her grandfather and wants to collaborate with another writer, someone from outside the family. Specifically, she wants to write it with me, which I find awfully flattering.
       It will be a relief to be doing a collaboration, with someone else doing nearly all the heavy research, after this monumental Undressing job, where I had to acquaint myself with nearly seventy years of cultural history and dig into the lives of several people. It will also be a lot of fun, both because Nicky herself is a joy and because this grandpa of hers, this Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, lived such an extraordinary life: cavalry officer, chased Pancho Villa, fought in World War I, served at the Paris talks of 1919, married a Swedish countess, got court martialed, turned himself into a successful pulp writer, conceived the comic book, founded DC, discovered Superman, had the company stolen, and became a military historian. For starters.
       The story behind the story is meaningful to me, too, because the reason I started talking to Nicky in the first place is that I got a lot wrong when I wrote about her grandfather in Men of Tomorrow. Somehow, although I can't remember quite how, those conversations eventually led to her asking me to collaborate on the real story, giving me the chance to make amends for sloppy research. Life is generous.

A Boring New Year, Please

I never wanted to be dull. Not that writing for a living ever promised big thrills, not like testing military jets or fighting fires on oil rigs or anything, but it did seem like a route to a challenging life full of unexpected turns; if nothing else, it would make me look more interesting than most of the other people who made their livings sitting at desks. That's why I dropped out of college: too predictable. I wanted a career of gambles and improvisations and surprises, both good and bad. 
       In my private life I was much less daring, at least for the first few decades. But in my thirties that changed too, as I discovered a predilection for flinging myself into emotional tornadoes. Even in my quest for stability I was unstable, as my wife and I broke up, came back together, broke up again, came together again, and...you get the picture.
       In my early fifties, by which time most people have burned out and settled down, I was just reaching my peak: 2010 and 2011 were the most dramatically bizarre, wonderful, terrible years of my life (personally, especially, but in some ways professionally too). This year that just ended was a lot calmer, but still...I had a lot going on, and where I was at the end I couldn't have predicted at the start.
       Yet now I find myself wanting nothing more than a predictable year for 2013. I want to work calmly on the edits for this book until it's done and then move smoothly to writing the next one. No agonies of avoidance, please, and no drastic rethinkings of my entire purpose as a writer. I want to develop my story classes and the book I plan to base on those classes at a steady pace. From my personal life I ask only one thing: no drama. (Although I suppose no one's life is entirely free of drama, so let's make that: no life-changing turmoil and roof-blowing emotionality. Not if I can possibly head them off.) I want to show up consistently for my family and close friends. I want to know for sure where I'm going to be living, and I'll be more than happy to spend the whole year on one continent.     

      I'm thinking about all this in the context of the book I just read, Willa Cather's The Professor's House. This was the first book Cather wrote in her fifties, and it was unmistakably transitional for her. She'd made her reputation with a series of novels about struggle and hardship—although that's probably too simplistic. Let's say they were novels of depth and subtlety about pioneers and hard-scrabble farmers and soldiers whose lives were shaped by struggle and hardship. She didn't tend toward fireworks and cataclysm, but she didn't shy away from hard choices and brutal conflicts, either.  
       Then, in 1925, she wrote this slow, gentle, beautiful story about a middle-aged professor in a quiet Midwestern town, writing his history of the Spanish exploration of the Southwest, dealing with the small vanities of his family and neighbors, trying to put off moving from his comfortable old house into the fancy new one that his wife and daughters are convinced he deserves.  
       There's drama in the background of this quietude: it all revolves around the legacy of a mysterious young man who shook things up and died in the war, and the small events hint at the outlines of the great economic and cultural shifts of the century. But it's a deep background. Tom Outland lives on mainly through bittersweet memories and petty jealousies, barely enough to disrupt a family dinner, while Professor St. Peter confronts the future with exasperated sighs, poignant recollections, middle-aged whimsy, and the occasional pedantic crack. The ending's a bit rougher. But it's quiet, too.
      I don't know how to begin describing the understated glory of Cather's art. I'll just say that I didn't want to leave the book any more than I wanted the professor to leave his old house. I stretched my reading out over weeks and reread chapters along the way so I could stay there.
       It was with The Professor's House, though, that Cather's reputation with the critics began to change. Her previous novel was pretty widely taken as a major work, and the one before that had won the Pulitzer Prize. This one drew far less notice, and over the next few years she found herself ever more frequently the target of critical dismissals.
       It was the new critics of the 1930s who went after her most fiercely, the politically heated young studs like Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling, who demanded that every writer tackle the class conflicts and institutional upheavals that preoccupied their generation. Hicks especially went after Cather for her "refusal to examine life as it is," meaning her refusal to see life as he and his Ivy League Stalinist friends defined it.
       Well, fooey. That's what I say.
       At least, that's what I say now. But there was a time, I have to admit, when I might have sympathized with Hicks and his friends. I would never have agreed, entirely—I was never politically doctrinaire—but in my twenties I may well have compared Cather unfavorably with the two-fisted class warriors, Dos Passos and Steinbeck, who stirred my blood, and the probers of the grotesque, Faulkner and Anderson, who flattered my belief in the clarity of my own unblinking gaze. 
       Ah, youth.
       Well, not now I won't. Not this particular year, at least, and maybe never again. This year I want the quiet depth of the fifty-something Willa Cather. Not only in what I read but in how I live. I want solid and steady. Amusing and fulfilling and slightly melancholy. But no big drama, thanks very much. I had all that. It was exciting, and I'm glad it's in my backstory. But it's time for a more grown-up story.

Grand Old Fantasies

There's been a lot to analyze and think about in the results of our recent election, but what I'm finding most fascinating right now is the astounding wrongness of Republican predictions on the eve of the vote—or, to be more precise, the stubborn adherence to wrongness by a whole lot of smart people in the face of overwhelming evidence.

       Without exception (as far as I know), prominent Republicans predicted a Mitt Romney victory while nearly every nonpartisan analysis of the polls put the probability of an Obama victory at 80 or 90 percent. And this wasn't just let's-predict-victory-to-keep-our-spirits-up cheerleading. These were serious prognostications. Some expected a Romney landslide, when even the most Republican-leaning state polls showed him trailing in nearly all the swing states he needed to win.

Nor were these just the usual Fox News gasbags like Dick Morris. They included seasoned observers like George F. Will (who a few months before had written a sober and sensible analysis of why Obama was going to be very hard to unseat), strategists like Karl Rove (whose credibility would seem to require a realistic grasp of the facts), and, worst of all, the very people who should have been most realistic about what was going on with the electorate, the pollsters working for the Romney campaign.

        I heard three main arguments from these people as to why all the nonpartisan analyses were wrong. The first was that the polls were "skewed," especially that they were "oversampling Democrats." Even though 38% of voters identified as Democrats and only 32% as Republicans, several pundits insisted that voters from the two parties should be sampled equally, even hinting (at least on Fox News) that the greater number of Democrats was the result of the pollsters' own political biases. This seemed to spring, on the one hand, from a certain paranoia—why on earth would pollsters and odds makers whose livelihoods depend on accuracy intentionally publicize inaccurate information to express a political sentiment?—and on the other from the juvenile but deep-seated resentment that we hear so much of from the right wing lately, that the world is unfairly ranged against them. Republicans should be sampled the same as Democrats, damn it. Otherwise it's just no fair!
       The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.

       The most reality-based of the arguments was the one that held that while the polls' projections of turnout among young and nonwhite voters were based on 2008 results, the truth would surely be that those groups would only turn out at 2004 levels; in others words, 2008 was a fluke because a mad passion for Barack Obama made black people and twenty-somethings behave in a way they never would again. There was actually some evidence to support that one: pro-Romney voters expressed distinctly higher levels of interest and intensity than pro-Obama voters. Still, interest levels have always been an unreliable measure; organized get-out-the-vote operations have proven to matter more, and no one doubted that the Democratics had that part down. The non-partisan poll analysts had the same basic information and didn't bother much about the "intensity gap."
       The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?  
       This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
       Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
       Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.  
       In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.

        

Thankful

I spent Thanksgiving morning straightening out rewrites on The Undressing of America. I just didn't want to leave the work until I was needed to help cook and devour family food. It's not that I don't like Thanksgiving or enjoy hours of doing nothing; it's just that I like writing even more, especially when a big, complicated project is coming together so well. I'm grateful to have a job I want to do even when I have a perfect excuse to blow it off.

       I know I'll be doing this forever, too. At an age when more and more of my peers are talking about retiring, I'm looking forward to another few decades of hard work. There are practical reasons for that: freelance writers don't get a pension, and the boom-and-bust nature of the job doesn't give you much chance to build up a big retirement account. But even if I have the money to stop, I won't want to. Most of my writing heroes worked until they dropped. I like thinking about the 75-year-old Edith Wharton falling to a stroke with the uncertain end of The Buccaneers stretching before her, Joseph Campbell letting go at 83 with not even half of his colossal Historical Atlas of World Mythology finished, P. G. Wodehouse just about to revise another Blandings Castle novel when God plucked him into the sky at 93.
       I'm thankful for this career path with no finish line, this competition with no laurels to rest on. I look forward to leaving my own unfinished manuscript someday. You know: the one that everyone says would have been among my best work if I'd only had time to finish it.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

I stopped following the news a few weeks ago. It was the election that did it—but I didn't stop so I could get away from politics, I did it so I could focus better on politics.  
       Not the media version of politics, that Frankenstein of sports reportage and fabricated hysteria, but the politics where I can actually do something useful: phone banking, door knocking, whatever. The news industry depends not only on keeping us seat-belted onto the roller coaster of anxiety but also on keeping us transfixed on details, on poll numbers, momentum, and supposed turning points, on graphs and gaffes, like a chicken on a snake. No, not a snake. Snakes pose active problems to chickens that require responses. Most election news is just a finger-drawn line in the dirt that the poor dumb bird—and I—only think is a snake.

       The one newsy website I've allowed myself periodic visits to, when I want a soft-spoken overview that calms me down instead of churns me up, is Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. As Silver points out, his statistics-based, algorithm-driven forecasts for the winners in the presidential election for every one of the fifty states are exactly the same now, on November 1, as they were when he rolled out this year's model on June 7. We won't know for a few days if those forecasts are right, but it suggests how little all the blips in the news cycle and squiggles on the poll graphs have amounted to.

       When I let myself worry about those blips and squiggles, when I start following the hyperlinks like bread crumbs endlessly into the tangled woods of information, I become less effective. Maybe I slack off because I think I know the future or maybe I freeze up because I think it's too much for me to handle, but more likely I just fall under the spell of the Need to Know. No matter how much I learn, I become convinced that if I read that one more op-ed or one more poll analysis I'll capture that last piece of information I need to make sense of it all.
       Which isn't innately a bad thing. Except that the time I spend reading or watching or listening to the news is time I'm not spending making a phone call or offering a carless voter a ride to the polls. And, although I may sometimes fool myself into believing the contrary, that information isn't going to inspire me to new action or tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do. News geekery is just geekery, and geekery is for when there's time to kill. 
       I got some vindication for this when a friend of mine who's been helping with big fundraisers asked one of the campaign's main finance people how he stayed so cool and upbeat in the midst of all the post-first-debate hysteria about tumbling poll numbers and shifting momentum, and he said, "I just don't pay attention to it."

       I've decided that there are three reasons to learn a thing. One, because it helps me do something I want to do. Two, because it enables me to have conversations I want to have. And three, because it's just fun to know. 
       But following the news cycles doesn't help me do anything but follow more news cycles. And I'm sick of the conversational cycles that cycle around the news cycles—after a couple of weeks there's nowhere they can go but hand wringing, impotent fuming, and sighs of despair. And I finally caught on that the roller coaster of information was only making me anxious. Which is a problem, and not just for selfish reasons: I'm a lot less effective at everything, but especially at encouraging other people, when I'm anxious than when I'm upbeat, energized, and focused on what matters.
      It would be different if something I learned from the news might change my mind about the big issues, but I don't have to go searching for that. I mean, if anything happens that's big enough to make me want to see a different party in the White House and Senate (I don't know what that could be, but if), I'll hear about it without clicking on Google News six times a day. What I need to know is what my job is right now, and for that the news won't help me at all.
       So I guess if I'm going to spin out a life lesson from the last few weeks, it would be this: It's good to know the big stuff that shapes your goals and the little stuff that tells you what to do next. It's the in-between stuff that'll kill you. 

Not of a Feather

This ran a while back, in a slightly different form, in 7x7 magazine. I was reminded of it when a friend asked me, in a recent conversation on the Writers Grotto's participation in the upcoming Litquake, how I would describe the cultural identity of San Francisco. I still can't describe it, for the reasons explained below.

Outside the Peet’s Coffee in Potrero Center, there’s a flock of birds who perch on the chairbacks near people sitting and drinking their coffee. It’s easy to take them for blackbirds looking for food, but they’re not. Blackbirds are like New Yorkers, restless, quick, aggressively biting at opportunities. These slower and more patient creatures are cowbirds, who might grab a crumb if it lands near them but are generally content just to sit near people, as if enjoying our company; which they are, in a way. Cowbirds evolved to survive on the insects startled out of the grass by herds of bison and cattle, equipping them with an instinct to hang around groups of large, sedentary mammals. Somehow this flock found its way to a place where there are no cattle, and so they seek out the company of the only large, sedentary mammals they can find: San Franciscans drinking coffee.

      There’s something, as we like to say, “very San Francisco” about that odd, serene scene. It reminds me of one of our best traits, our ability to coexist quietly, perching in our separate realities in a sort of loose mutualism, even a benign indifference. I experience fewer tensions here around cultural or individual contrasts—fewer tensions about anything, really, except parking—than in any other city.

      But I experience something else, too, as I move through the city: some lack of collective identity, a mystery about what it means to be a “San Franciscan.” From neighborhood to neighborhood I feel like I’m moving through herds and flocks of very different creatures, coexisting contentedly but in separate realities. When I drive from Noe Valley to a Hong Kong dessert place in the Sunset, it’s hard to say how I and the guy behind the counter are both San Franciscans except in the literal fact of our residence. This is not about being a native or an immigrant either. Raised in the Santa Clara Valley, I feel very Californian—genial but cautious, with a certain mellow, all-weather slowness. But by that very fact I feel like a perpetual visitor in this foggy island that feels as far from California as anywhere else.

      I could say similar things about any diverse city, of course. But even in New York, as heterogeneous as a place gets, there’s a sense of what it means to be a New Yorker—someone who, whether his ancestral tongue is Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, or Southern Black, has been molded by the city to a certain attitude and speed, a particular way of pronouncing “R.” Here, we don’t even agree on how to pronounce our street names. On my way to Candlestick Park, I drive past Kay-sah-dah Street, but the people ignoring my car live on Kyoo-say-duh Street, although we all clearly see the sign reading "Quesada." (And don’t even get me started on the East Coast expats who still talk about Jew-nipero Serra Boulevard.)

      There are native San Franciscans. My former doctor was one, proud to be sending his son to Lowell, his own high school. His San Francisco, though, is a city of tract homes on quiet streets inhabited by low-profile Asian professionals, a city I’ve barely come to know in three decades here. There are even old-soil, multigenerational San Franciscans. But most of them live in San Bruno. Drive down Mission through Daly City until it becomes the El Camino and you'll eventually pass the San Francisco Police Officers Credit Union building, a breadcrumb on the trail to where the people who wear the name of our city on their uniforms have been driven by housing prices. The people whose ancestors lived in a town called Frisco are mostly an invisible substrate; and when they do call attention to themselves, it’s likely to be some unfortunate demonstration of how the city has left them behind, like trying to save Army Street from the unstoppable waves of American change.

      Recently, a friend of mine took off on a rant about the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, those invaders from San Ramon and Novato whom she only grudgingly tolerates in her San Francisco. She is the very image of one version of San Francisco, riding her bike in her canvas high tops and Peruvian knit cap. Except that she just moved here from Pennsylvania five years ago, while I’m sure many of her despised B&Ters grew up within 20 miles of here.

      What most of us consider “San Franciscan” is constantly being rewritten, usually by newcomers. Again, I could say so is New York, but there, a continuing culture of publishing and galleries that molds new influences into an umistakably Manhattanesque shape. The New York literary community is full of out-of-town immigrants, but most seem directed by a sense of being New York Writers, with the ghosts of Max Perkins and William Shawn also lurking in the corners. In the SF Writers Grotto, where I feel like something of an oddball for being from the Bay Area, I can’t say what distinguishes us as SF Writers, except maybe a relative lack of vanity and competitiveness. Which is often how we define SF, not by what it is but by what we’re not; specifically, not New York or LA.

      Maybe that indefinability is one of our great virtues. This city is less an entity than a stage, a benign and beautiful setting in which we all have the freedom to create our own, separate San Franciscos. Like the Peets patrons and the cowbirds, we exist side by side but in different realities. The woman with the latte may never understand that the bird perching on the next chair is really there for her, not her scone, and the bird may never catch on that the woman just isn't going to stir up that long-desired cloud of gnats. But the sun is out, and the breeze is soft, and who needs to worry?

      In that quiet coexistence there is deep comfort. We all perch together in the diluted sunlight of a San Francisco morning, lost in our own contemplations, nomads at rest, waiting together for the universe to serve up its largesse. These can be the city’s sweetest moments, these tentative encounters between two locals both feeling like eternal visitors, no one having any proprietary claims or any particular roles, pausing for a moment in our separate migrations.