The in-between

The idea of liminal or in-between spaces has been discussed in anthropology for a hundred years. The basic idea, first outlined by Arnold van Gennep and then expanded by Victor Turner, is that rituals tend to go through three stages: a “before,” and in-between, and an “after.”

This originally described rites of passage such as the transition from child to adult, but what excites me is the idea of applying liminality to other things: locations, people, states of awareness. (This is triggered by the interesting discussion on D. M. Cornish’s blog.)

I should point out that although once I was an aspiring academic, I have long since come to my senses. So it may be that there exists a whole body (or “corpus”) of work (or “text”) that studies this phenomenon (or text. That’s right, you use texts to study texts. How glad I am to have escaped that Ouroborean madness.) Point is, this may not be an original idea.

A liminal space or moment exists in between two normal places, or normal periods. These liminal spaces are places of danger, ambiguity, potential, uncertainty. The normal rules that govern everyday behavior and our expectations ... have shifted. The world pauses, power crackles in the wings.

Look at a passage from Tennyson’s Ulysses, one of my favorites. We’ve just spent several stanzas reading about the narrator’s quiet and boring home life, the looming threat of old age and weakness, and the wildness of the world outside his door. A thought tickles his mind: “Some work of noble note may yet be done...” And then the poem pauses from the narrative.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.

Something is about to happen.

In the next line we learn that he’s decided to leave the comforts of home and return to the wild. He’s leaving, and that liminal moment is when he made the decision. The in-between moment when anything is possible.

A frontier on the edge of an empire is a liminal place. Beyond here be monsters. Something that looks mostly like a person but which is not quite human: liminal.

It is the moment of freefall as an acrobat goes from one trapeze to another. Tidal pools between ocean and rock. The quiet whispered exhalation just before a thunderstorm.

When I stand in the bookstore and get pulled into a book and lose all sense of time and place and who I am ... and then straighten up, rub my eyes, and look at the shelves of books and the world I knew and they seem completely foreign: that “book madness” as I pause between the book and returning to my own world, is liminal.

Like almost everything, this can go too far. My pencil is dull, so it’s in a liminal state between sharp and unused. My liminal sandwich is half-eaten, hovering between existence and non-existence. Come on.

But the idea that these in-between moments (or places, or people, or anything potentially) have special significance, special power, fascinates me.

The story beyond the book

Interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about literacy and online versus print reading or something. I don't know, I didn't really read it.

Ha! Yes I did, and I was going to write a cogent and logical response, edit it, and then post it here. Then I realized I could prove my own point by allowing this online medium to be less formal, less polished, and -- let's face it -- less "rich" than the printed word.

Not that there's not crap printed. We all know there is. And not that there's nothing good to read online, we all know there is.

But it got me thinking about the generation growing up with the Internet (and not only do I remember the existence of typewriters, I remember using one) and what they may think about books. As if "a generation" thinks about anything all the same way anyway. But never mind that: the wheels of argument are greased by generalization. Off we go.

One point the article made was that people who do all their "reading" online seem to be not reaching the full richness of story that's possible in print, whether by their short-attention grazing nature, the myriad of online distractions, or some other third thing.

Except books aren't quite perfect either, are they? The story that we as authors tell, and the story that a reader creates with us through the act of reading, that story isn't just ink on a page. It lives outside the book, just like feelings are outside of words or the rules of a game are outside a pack of cards. The words or the cards or the printed pages are just the tools we have for telling the story. Imperfect expressions of that story.

Now. I believe that printed books are the best way to get as close as possible to the story that floats out there between reader and writer. And there is something undeniably special about the act of reading from a printed page, whether it's the whispered scrape of a page turning, or the pause and renewal at the height of action when a chapter ends and the next begins, or the sheer weighty joy of a stack of new books denting your arm as you carry them over to your comfy chair.

There is something special about that that no other medium can match.

But if we accept that story -- meaning -- exists beyond its medium, then there must be other ways of expressing that meaning. Including, for example, online. OMG, right?

Point being, reading a book has its own intrinsic worth in and of the act of reading itself. But reading a book is not just an end in itself, it's also a means to a different end, a way to reach the story.

Maybe someday we'll look at this print-versus-online debate and laugh at how misguided it was. Or maybe we'll mark it as the beginning of a great divide in literacy and the imagination. Either way, there are stories to be told.

What do you think? (Keeping in mind the irony of reading this online instead of in print.)

Micro book

Friday morning I printed out a tiny version of my manuscript and got to work identifying problem spots.

Compressing 61,000 words into 40 pages took some font- and margin-monkeying, but 7-point Times New Roman is about as far as I can go without a magnifying glass.


The beauty of this method -- besides just alarming the cats by spreading paper across what is usually their hairy realm -- is that I can see the rhythm of problems. I can (literally) visualize not just the balancing counterpoints of scene and tension but, for example, the surprising fact that most of my scene issues are in the first half of the book.

Or maybe that shouldn't surprise me, given the amount of dilly-dallying and meandering I tend to do in a draft before getting down to the business of telling the story.

The good news, I suppose, is that the second half is fairly clean.

My main problem seems to be an over-reliance on dialogue to tell the story, rather than narrative telling the story. I like writing dialogue; it's fun, and it comes easily to me. Too easily, it turns out.

Now: to work.

p.s. Now I can post pictures. Ho ho ho.

When Animals Almost Attack

I do not live in the wilderness, though I suppose it can feel that way when visitors put on their wading boots to come visit us from the shining land of Oz we call the big city. But we do have a wooded neighborhood that is filled with animals at dawn, when I run through it.

On Tuesday morning I saw a deer in a bush so close I could have reached out and touched it (the deer). Why didn't I? After all, how often do you get to say, "I touched a deer this morning"? Well, I was afraid it would attack. Just a herbivore, you say? Ha! Have you seen a deer up close? Their heads are the size of dog's heads, with long lean snouts and mouthfuls of fangs and/or regular teeth. It could also (I reasoned to myself) spring from the bush and beat me with its head. Or stomp on my ears with its wicked little hooves. No thanks!

Yesterday morning things got even more exciting. I'm always delighted to see bats fluttering in the blue light of dawn, but yesterday one flapped so close I could hear its wings. It sounded like someone shuffling a deck of cards. Then it came back, looped around and came back again. This, quoth I, is not normal bat behavior. Had I become some sort of bat-magnet? Was I emitting bat pheromones? 'Cause it just smelled like sweaty running clothes to me but you never know what's going to activate mad bat lust. After all, perhaps my overwhelming attractiveness cannot be limited to just humanity.

Just as I was feeling pretty studly, it occurred to me that if the bat decided to clamp onto my face, hook its little prickly claws into my ears, and start chewing on my nose? I'm not sure I could stop it. And what if it squeaked a triumphant summons to its bat-friends, and they all fluttered around me like a cloud of dark butterflies and carried me away?

Running is such a calming, meditative time.

Cold Light of Day

Or is it the dawn of a new day? Stay with me.

When criticism comes back on a draft, professional, highly qualified criticism, and it's right, should the response be despair, defensiveness and intransigence? Or a getting down to the slow lonely business of making the story better?

There's only one right answer.

It's easy to ignore advice I don't agree with. And it's easy to convince myself that I don't agree with anything, especially if it's difficult. I think often writers convince themselves that anyone criticizing their draft simply didn't get it. Didn't appreciate the hard work, the vision, the insight, the genius. O the Philistines we must contend with!

But what if it's right? What if when I look at criticism in the cold light of day sometimes I have to admit: yes. This will make the story better. And my reaction changes from "Why must the world thwart my brilliance / fail to recognize this thing of beauty I've created?" to "Crap. Crap crap crap. Why didn't I see this problem before?"

It's been said before, but I think what separates published from unpublished writers is not talent -- though that helps -- but the willingness to work. We cannot be be so in love with our creation that it makes us resistant to improvement. That's not faithfulness to the story, it's stubborn brittleness.

If the change improves the story, it must be made. Simple as that.

"Being Dead"

[This is a whip-quick writing exercise triggered by Sunday Scribblings. These are a great way to do some writing without all the pressure of Working On The Novel.]

The first thing is that there's no such thing as "being dead." That's like saying "I'm being born." It's a doorway to ... well, to something else. Not a tall doorway with a brass knob and a breathless sense of excitement. But like those bad dreams where you're crawling on your hands and knees in the dark, and you elbows brush the walls and you realize you're in a cave, and the floor is sandy and hard and your head scrapes the ceiling, and it's getting smaller and smaller, and you stretch out on your belly and grind through the sand, feeling it on your chin as you inch forward on fingertips and toes, the ceiling pressing against you. You exhale to narrow your body and press forward. You can't back up.

Dying's like that. It's not easy, but I suppose neither is birth.

And then you pass through something, and it's different. There's no special powers and it's usually very quiet. Remember that scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus goes down into the darkness and fills a bowl or something with blood, and one by one the ghosts of people he knew come shambling toward him? They smelled the blood.

How did Homer know? That red-rich bowl brimming with the thick salty fluid of life. Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Everything that we left behind, everything that we once were. And we feel its warmth and helplessly drift toward it, knowing we'll never be able to--

But never mind that. We're not evil. Where was I?

The worst part is that most people, living people, don't hear you, even when you scream at them. It's like being underwater. Most people.

Maybe it was the way I screamed, but finally, finally, a little girl sat up in bed and stared at me. She took her thumb out of her mouth for one word.

"What?"

"You can see me?"

She nodded.

"Why are you still sucking your thumb, how old are you?"

"You're not my mom." And she made a gesture she shouldn't have known.

"Listen," I said. "I need your help. I'm always cold. I can't get warm and I need to get warm."

"Are you a ghost?"

"I think so," I said. "But it's not ... it's not like what you think. I'm not scary." I moved toward her. "I promise," I said.

The End of the Boat

Most boats have two ends, a pointy end and a not-pointy end. This week I'm building the not-pointy end, or transom. The transom is where the rudder attaches, and the boat's name is written, and what people will see when I'm sailing away from them, ha ha!

It's exciting because until now I've been building the frames (sometimes and incorrectly called "ribs") of the boat, which define it's broad-bellied shape in cross-section but which won't really be visible in the completed boat. The transom is different, though. That vaguely oval shape of pale marine plywood, dark with pencil lines and notes ("PORT AFT UP") will actually be in a real boat someday!

It's always a surprise when a stack of lumber transforms from a long woodworking project into an actual boat. And when I prop the unfinished transom up to see how it looks, somehow I can envision the curving shape of the finished boat. It's not easy holding that ghost-shape in my mind when I bend back to the minutiae of cutting and drilling and scraping. But it's good to be reminded of what this is all for.

Can I resist a writing metaphor?

No I certainly cannot. It's like writing a rough draft with the finished story held in your mind. I don't mean the words and chapters and scenes, but the meaning of it all. How I want people to feel while they're reading it. What it's all for, in other words.