Let’s add a character and start a sentence: When death surprised Henry in the rose garden.…
What do we have now?
More than a string of words. I wrote them. Each has meaning for me. But once I put them down, maybe just because I liked their individual sounds and flavors, the combination implied a direction. It shouted questions. What brought Henry to the garden? What manner of death did he find there? His own? Another’s? Have the roses some meaning or connection to what will come?
Each following word must flow from the answers to the questions I perceive consciously, and probably from my unconscious reaction to the emotions they provoke. From the first word, my choices for the next are limited. Beyond that, they have begun probing me, pulling memories that have never touch each other together. I can plan the next sentence, plot the rest of the story carefully, but with each word I lay down I limit myself and I must wrestle with each word I’ve written as I search for the next. I’m still in control, of course. I can change a word or throw away the whole string and cast another, but the new words will interact with each other just as the old ones did. They will ask new questions, lead me in another direction, and in the end it still comes to a wrestling match, me against the words.
We shape each other.
That’s the point. I tell myself that I control the words as I might a spirited horse: I have a destination in mind—the plot points, resolution, anticlimax, and so forth—and that while the words might, like a team of spirited horses, pick their own path, the destination is of my choosing. I tell myself that, but then the words take me somewhere surprising, or they lead me nowhere at all, it is hard to continue the fiction that I’m in control, that whatever the story contains is there because I put it there. As often as not, I’m learning from the words even as I write them. The differing strengths of the verbs, the grace of adverbs, the adjectives’ furtive collusion and, best of all, the bump-patter-BAM-patter beat as the sentences drive the plot, whip the tale this way and that, alternately hinder and develop the meaning of—
Well, there it is again. Meaning.
It pops out of nowhere. The words conspire to limit what the author may say. The author fights their tyranny to say what he originally intended, or at least come close to his first mark, and both change. Each layer of words is limited by the last and transformed by the next. It’s a shifting architecture, right up to publication date. You’d think that would fix it in place, but we haven’t considered the readers yet. Each of them will read a subtly different story into the same string of words. Worse, if the story’s any good, the same reader gets something different from it with each re-reading.
Don’t believe me? Try Moby Dick at twenty and again at forty. Don’t like the classics? Read the Travis McGee series at fifty and try to remember what you saw in it at fifteen.
The author has it worse.
The first time through the manuscript, nothing lies ahead of the last word but white space. It isn’t a space of infinite possibilities, however. It is full of invisible lines, walls erected by the work already done, and these constraints narrow as we move through the book. The second pass is even harder. That’s where the gulf between the vision and the accomplishment appears, and where the real job begins. Actually, I should say jobs, because there are two of them. The easier is identifying the shortfalls in the work and kneading it into the desired shape. That done, I’ve generally got a decent story. It isn’t enough though. There’s still that second job, the hard one.
Each of those words I’ve written so far speaks to the others. In most cases, the dialogue is slight, but sometimes, sometimes…take that rose garden, for instance. It may call up something in me or, more important, in the character of Henry, that opens a window I’ve never looked through before, or have only glanced through with dull eyes, and suddenly Henry, and death, and roses, are all transformed. A resonance appears. The story begins working on a level I never intended when I first plotted it. Dizzy, caught by the revelation, I catch my breath. The story changes and, believe it or not, I change too. The words have taught me something I didn’t know, revealed something about the characters or the setting or even life that I didn’t put in the story, and now I have to develop, no matter how many rewrites it takes. Where once my job was making the words live up to my vision, now my vision must live up to what the words have taught me it could be.
There’s an alchemy operating here.
The grand goal of the alchemist was transmutation—led into gold, base element into pure. The great secret, however, was that the work transmutes the worker. The alchemist is transformed by his hours, his devotion, and by the recalcitrance of the medium, dull matter or dull words. Never mind that the goal is ultimately unreachable. Never mind that the perfect story cannot be written. The work is the thing, and all else, ego and money and all the rest, is puffery, insubstantial and inconsequential.
The story you’ve read, Monkey on a Chain, is far from perfect, though it is the best story I could write at the time. The goal Barbara Peters set when she asked me to write this afterword was to tell you something about the work or something about myself. I hope I’ve done a little of both in the last few pages, but in case the words foiled me or, more likely, I failed them, let me summarize by saying that, because I wrote it, I could never write it again. It changed me, and that made the time I spent on it worthwhile. That made the rest of those ten thousand hours worthwhile.
Harlen Campbell
February 1999
About the Author
Harlen Campbell was born in a naval hospital in South Carolina and lived with his family in twenty-one different places before the age of seventeen. He attended college at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, but left to join the United States Army. He was stationed in West Germany and then Vietnam where he became a journalist. He now lives with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
More from this Author
For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:
www.poisonedpenpress.com/harlen-campbell
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