Mappers and Muddlers: Muddlers

There are many ways to write fiction, but mappers anchor one end of the spectrum and Muddlers anchor the other. My last post detailed how Mappers operate (plan it out ahead) and revealed several of the many variations of mapping, some of the needs resolved by mapping (even Muddlers map a little), and the efficiency of mapping to counteract commercial  pressure. It can be said of Muddlers (the purest of them make it up as they go) that they aren’t as organized in their habits and perhaps in their thinking as mappers are, some of them anyway. Most writers fall somewhere between, but most would acknowledge they adhere to one school or the other.

Take the writer who wants to create a story along the lines of “boy meets girl.” The writer is not certain going in that a happy ending where “boy gets girl back again” is in the cards. Yet he or she is sure that many options will get explored as the story is being written. This fits nicely with Bob Shacochis’s idea: Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There’s no joy of discovery in what you’re doing if that’s your strategy. (I highly recommend Easy in the Islands, Bob Shacochis’s collection of short stories.)

I would argue—not taking anything away from Mappers—that Muddlers are true relativists and find it antithetical to the self to write from a script. I also think that they come to the laptop or legal pad from an entirely different perspective, perhaps one more attuned to the art of writing than to the business of writing. Certain novels, those focused more on ideas than action, likely require a Muddler at the keyboard, one who is open to discovery and not just writing down what a now-closed mind has already assimilated or conjured up.

Another possibility is that the most successful of the Muddlers have what T.S. Eliot ascribed to Henry James: A mind so fine that no idea could corrupt it. While Eliot described what he thought as James’s brilliance, it occurs to me, rather ironically, that a brilliant mind would not require a map at all because the map was already in his or her head and no tangential thought would divert him or her from the mapped course.

I’ve concluded that the biggest difference between Mappers and Muddlers is Mappers generally have already come up with a solution to extricate their protagonist(s) from difficulties (by working backwards) while Muddlers are stuck with their protagonist(s) in a pickle and only the protagonist, maybe with the help of a supporting character, can get the protagonist out of trouble. This is especially true when the protagonist gets into trouble all on his or her own with help from supporting characters perhaps, but no help from the author. What  makes it the most fun is when the protagonist is at odds with the author as much as with the antagonist.

I suggested in the first half of this post that template-writing allowed an author to crank out a book in a very short time. I’m in no way suggesting Robert Louis Stevenson was a template-writer, but he is said to have written The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days. As a fan of the author, I’m tempted to believe that he got an idea in his head and worked around the clock to get it down on paper.

Some blockbuster novels have been written in a relatively short time. Others, like Catcher in the Rye, took many years, as did Catch 22 and Gone With the Wind. I don’t know if that proves anything except that there is a “thickness” about them that is appealing. All three could have been written from a map. I like to think not, but I did hear from an inside source—a man named Mitchell—that when the family’s matriarch died, descendants gathered in Atlanta to bury the woman and divvy up the spoils. Second cousin Margaret, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, got the window shades. A paper shortage in the South during the Civil War prompted the matriarch to write her diary on the shades. The rest, as they say, is history. Availing herself of the window-shade diary and mixing it with her own love story, she penned Gone With the Wind.

I like the idea that Muddlers stand a better chance of running into serendipity in the exercise of writing a novel—one thing leading to another. Perhaps the quality of the final product rests on how open the mind of the Mapper is, embracing the ineffable if it becomes an obstacle. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all. Perhaps even Jack Kerouac used a map.

Mappers sometimes tend to tie up too many loose ends or not create them in the first place. This can lead to a problem in the lack of verisimilitude. Life is not clean and tidy. The closer the writer gets to clean and tidy, the less real it may seem, though not all fiction is realism, and the suspension of disbelief covers a great many sins.

Mappers and Muddlers: Mappers

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There are many ways to write fiction, but mappers anchor one end of the spectrum and muddlers anchor the other. Most writers fall somewhere between, but most would acknowledge they adhere to one school or the other.

The most famous mapper was James Joyce, not only because he produced the most famous novel, Ulysses, but because he is reputed to have papered the walls of his office with maps and charts and timelines to account for every character’s locations, actions, thoughts, and dreams in relation to those of the other characters during one 24-hour period in 1904 Dublin.

While not as meticulously oriented to detail, screenwriters, by virtue of the conventions of their craft must follow a precise timeline: one minute equals one page of writing, the first crisis must come on or about page x, and so on. It’s much like a crossword: three down has to be exactly six letters, starting with a C.

My guess—in the novel-writing world—murder-mystery writers are most often mappers. The writer, for instance, reads Robert Frost, thinks about the world ending in fire or ice, and decides ice is nice and would suffice. Then the writer ponders how to do “ice.” Stabbed with an icicle has been done as has the body locked in a freezer. The writer has a vague recollection of some hapless victim shot with an ice bullet, another killed with a frozen leg of lamb, which the killer fed to investigating police. Something different then. How about strangulation? Certainly the autopsy would reveal the victim died from lack of oxygen, but it wouldn’t reveal how, as the ice would have melted. Research would suggest the size and shape of the ice lozenge. More thought would offer ways to introduce the weapon to the victim’s esophagus without allowing the victim to remove it and without leaving a physical trace on the victim. The key is everything is already worked out before the first word hits the page. One method of accomplishing this is writing the last chapter first or writing the first chapter, the last chapter, and then writing to the last chapter.

Another variation of mapping is the template. One suspects that a writer, whether of romance or another genre, who can crank out a novel every month or so, is somehow “cheating.” True and not true. Writing is a business, but not a business that can be outsourced to Bangalore. It took Salinger ten years to write Catcher in the Rye, which an avid reader might consume in one day. Tom Clancy (can’t say for sure he deserves the credit) came up with another idea. Let someone else do the dirty work of actually writing a novel based on your idea. Let ten someone else’s simultaneously write novels from ten of your ideas. One precedent for this collective writing is James A Michener who reputedly employed an army of researchers and “helpers” and worked from his own template. I have no inside knowledge, but James Patterson may have borrowed from Michener’s model. If you find a successful template, you’d be foolish not use it.

An additional variation of the template is what occurred in the James Bond franchise. Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond books. Hollywood picked up the franchise. All well and good, but Fleming went and did a stupid and unprofitable thing. He died. Ultimately, Hollywood ran out of books. It ran out of books, but not screenwriters. I remember sitting on the St. Thomas ferry on its forty-minute run to Charlotte Amalie. I picked up a book left behind on the seat next to mine. Five pages in, I understood why it was left behind. Ten pages in, I was ready to stick my head over the side and puke my guts out. I realized that the book was not only based on the movie, it was merely a recitation of the movie’s action.

I’ve always adhered to Günter Grass’s proposition that even bad books are books and therefore sacred, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. Many years ago, the Economist printed an article about how many good trees were killed to produce bad books. If you’ve ever been a devotee of that weekly, you know it’s clever and sophisticated, and its tongue is firmly attached to its cheek. One issue featured an obituary of a well know writer. There was an image of the man. “So Long” was the headline. A pertinent quote from The Power and the Glory followed. Nowhere in the obituary was the name of the deceased mentioned. If the reader didn’t recognize the obituary as Graham Greene’s, the reader was ignorant beyond salvation.

Back to the killing of trees. The article’s conclusion was that the line had to be drawn somewhere. The line was drawn. It was drawn at John le Carré, As you might guess, it didn’t reveal whether the line was drawn above or below his name. Because he elevated the spy novel to literature, just as Hammett and Chandler elevated the detective novel, his name is far, far above any line weeding the publishable books from the unpublishable. Hollywood and the BBC have turned many of his books into movies. I’ve always liked le Carré’s comment: Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

An interesting tidbit from the Economist

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

Antilles

When the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a title Columbus finagled from the Spanish throne, weighed anchor for his 1492 voyage, the word Antilles already existed as a semi-mythological landmass or archipelago somewhere between the Canary Islands and India. It was up to Columbus to find it. Find it he did, and he became revered, as James Joyce suggested, because he was the last man to discover America.

The Antilles form the border between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, although the west end of Cuba and Yucatan divide the Caribbean from the Gulf of Mexico. That means the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos, while part of the West Indies, are not part of the Antilles and neither island group is in the Caribbean.

Geographers divide the Antilles into the Major Antilles and the Lesser Antilles. The Major Antilles are Cuba, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—all geologically made up from continental rock. The Lesser Antilles—younger volcanic and coral islands—are divided into the Leeward Islands (from the Virgin Islands to Guadeloupe), Windward Islands (Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago), and Leeward Antilles (Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire).

A lot of other small islands make up the Antilles, as most recognizably named islands have their own satellite islands. So many that it reminds me of a very old and stale joke, to which I remember only the punch line. The gist of it is three people are quizzed, in the manner of a competition, about the Titanic’s demise. The first contestant is asked: On what date did the Titanic sink? The answer was “15 April 1912.” The host acknowledged the correct answer and moved on to the second participant: How many died? The answer was “more than 1500.” The third contestant was feeling pretty secure until he heard the final question: Name them.

Geographically, the Caribbean Islands and Central America are part of North America. Because of Latin American ties to many of the islands and countries, there are those that include Central America and some Caribbean islands as part of South America. None of the islands is especially prosperous except for Trinidad (seven miles from South America with a population of 1.36 million), which has the third largest economy per capita in North America after the US and Canada. Trinidad has petroleum, the second largest Carnival after Rio, two Nobel prizewinners, two Miss Universe winners, and probably more KFC franchises per capita than anywhere in the world. It also has a pretty okay bookseller, Nigel Khan. It’s no slouch either in musical influence. While Jamaica is often seen as the center of Caribbean music, the steelpan, developed in Trinidad is reputed to be the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century—from WWII-surplus 55-gallon drums. Trinidad is also the home of calypso and soca and their many derivatives.

The World’s Saddest Goose

For ten years a pair of geese have staked out a nesting place on an inlet of the river. They arrive early, just a few days after the swans, and act as sentinels to guard their spot. Their violent antics have no effect on the swans, but somewhat deter the ducks. Once they’re established, the geese quiet down, but stay on guard. In ten years they have never produced goslings that I have seen. A couple of days before this photo, the parents proudly showed off a brood of five. This lone goose showed the following day and the next day and the next. It became clear then that it was the lone survivor of predators, its spouse dying to save the goslings.

Coming Soon! Epic Trials in the Leeward Isles

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The past half-dozen years have been mostly good for Captain Brian, but not so much lately. His old pal, Pirate Dan, is dying, and he is ill himself. His wife, Billie, hanging out in Nebraska to care for her parents, has been a no-show for months, missed by her husband and son, Hawkins. When their dog is killed, Hawk skips school and runs off. Lieutenant March of the VIPD finds him at the ruins of an old sugar mill, but he is not alone. Hawk returns home with Sally, a Caltech scientist on the run from foreign spooks and the FBI. Captain Brian doesn't immediately realize that his son isn't bringing home a playmate but a woman to replace his mother. He isn't opposed to the idea or to Sally and is prepared to second that emotion, but is soon forced to engage foreign spooks, ever-present and menacing, decked out in Aloha shirts—a sartorial tradition that began with Blackshirts and Brownshirts. Thus begins the battle of attrition. The Fed is a different matter, hovering out of sight, working his deceit, taking on the persona of an evil frat boy. Before long, Captain Brian has confiscated enough Glocks to stage a glockenspiel at the Pretty Okay Corral.