Next: Echoborgs

CYRANO:

Since, by yourself, you fear to chill her heart,
Will you—to kindle all her heart to flame—
Wed into one my phrases and your lips?

CHRISTIAN:
Your eyes flash!

CYRANO:
Will you?

CHRISTIAN:
Will it please you so?
—Give you such pleasure?

CYRANO (madly):
It!. . .
(Then calmly, business-like):
It would amuse me!
It is an enterprise to tempt a poet.
Will you complete me, and let me complete you?
You march victorious,—I go in your shadow;
Let me be wit for you, be you my beauty!

--Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand

The deal is sealed. Cyrano will be Christian's voice, Christian will be Cyrano's face. Roxane will, unknowingly, fall in love with both. And tragically, wind up with neither. A tale as old as time.

Let's admit: it would certainly be convenient to have a Cyrano along for those moments when we're tongue-tied or feeling dull, but you can't really drag another human being along, especially one who can provide you with sparkling conversation at a moment's notice.

I may be late to the party. but it appears technology has caught up with Cyrano and Christian. Have humans caught up with technology? We've put our toe in the water. Will we drown? Or drain the pool?

You may have seen the Bruce Willis sci-fi movie Surrogates. In that film, humanoid remote-controlled robots have pretty much taken over the public arena while their human controllers lounge at home in their pajamas vegetating. An alarming prospect, but the reversal is even more spine-chilling: Robots taking over human bodies--with the humans willingly giving up their autonomy, their voice. Writers and artists are rightly indignant about AI muscling in on our territory. That may be just the start.

The first technology used in service of this goal was good old-fasioned radio, used in a number of psychology experiments in the late 1970s. Cyranoids, as they were dubbed (the name an obvious tip of the hat to Cyrano) were the brainchild of Dr. Stanley Milgram, he of the infamous Stanford Experiment and the more benign six degrees of separation. A cyranoid (or "shadower") was a person who did not speak his own words, but rather those transmitted to him via radio from another person, the "source." The underlying idea was simple and elegant: to divorce the originator of the message from its content, setting it adrift, thereby eliminating the biases of the "interactant"--the person receiving the message. 

Any black person having a phone conversayion who has heard the amazingly tone-deaf remark uttered by a white person "But you don't sound black" is familiar with this phenomenon. Racial, gender, and age stereotyping in social interactions would be effectively blunted by this cyranic device. It promised lto peel away the medium from the message, substituting any medium desired. And after all, the medium is the message.

Of course, we encounter cyranoids every day, to a greater or lesser extent. I'm talking about sportscasters, newscasters, all those people with tiny monitors  stuffed in their ears, feeding them their scripts. We can't really measure what part of what we're hearing is coming from the voices in their heads--but that's the point.

"I say it here, it comes out there."

Let's look at a modern Cyrano update. Not Roxanne

--Broadcast News. 

Getting emotional with sci-fi

"My heart is full of X."

  

So we can easily imagine an alien, or a mutant with different abilities, different physiologies: four heads or tentacles for arms or the ability to walk through walls, or even an intelligent shade of blue (I think Douglas Adams came up with that one). But what if an alien or mutant or even just a different earthly species were equipped with an entirely different set of emotions, beyond hate, love, fear, doubt and chagrin. Emotions x, y, and z, a whole alien array, so different from our experience that they in no way correspond to anything in our ken?

We could still witness the physical manifestations of their emotions, like tears or blushing or the spraying of ink, but have no idea of their predicates. Would we be able to divide their emotions into positive and negative reflexes, or would that only mean positive or negative outcomes for ourselves if we responded correctly? What would be the key to unlock their "hearts?" We have a name for every shade of human emotion, yet we can barely even read the hearts of our own species. Probing might turn out to be be a highly decorous form of salutation.

Oh, Lord, please don't
let me be misunderstood

If we throw rocks at an alien, and an alien responds by hugging us, could we therefore assume that having rocks thrown at it is a positive experience for E.T.? And we can interpret their pelting us with rocks in turn as a positive sign? Or is its hug meant as a retaliatory response? Or is the alien simply modeling correct behavior in the hope that we will imitate it and leave off with the rock-throwing? (And how would it feel about being be referred to as an "it?" Does it have unimagined pronouns?) Or is it displaying x emotion? 

Sondheim in a Tree

"It strikes me that's what technique must be: the control of the information that
flows from a play to its audience; and in particular the ordering of the information."

--Tom Stoppard

 I want to talk about point of view in narration. It might help first if we think of a novel as a large packet of information, just like the data packets governed by the hypertext transfer protocol (http) on the internet, which delivers data, order, and destination-- which we can translate for our purposes as story, plot, and audience. 

Plot--the ordering, revealing or withholding of information in a story--is especially important in a time-based medium like drama, but also in novels, unless the reader elects to subvert the author's intent by reading the ending first, say, or the author subverts it as in The Dictionary of the Khazars (by Milorad Pavic), wherein he invites the reader to assemble the story in any order they like.  

Point of view directs the information spigot in sometimes subtle ways. First it can be can be additive, as in Toni Morrison's Jazz, with multiple narrators slowly bringing the truth into focus, or or subtractive with an unreliable narrator, sometimes severely restrictive, as in the Benjy Compson section of The Sound and the Fury. Even multiple narrators can be subtractive when the different narrators accounts clash so much that we  are left at sea.

Which brings us to Someone in a Tree, a tour de force musical number from Stephen Sondheim's Broadway show Pacific Overtures. The show is about Japan's (unwilling) opening to western trade in the late 19th century. Under threat of force, the emperor's representatives set up a meeting with the Americans to devise a treaty. We begin with the Reciter (the uber-narrator of the play) bemoaning the fact that there is no authentic Japanese account of what was said that day in the treaty house. An old man appears.

Plato's dog

      The Turing Test, first proposed concretely in 1950

 by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, supposedly tests whether a computer can think like a human being. But it doesn't measure that at all, but rather whether a computer can fool a human into believing it's another human. And the test in one form or another has been fooling unsophisticated observers ever since 1961 's ELIZA. 

     ELIZA was basically a rudimentary chatbot, and it wasn't intelligent at all. It was basically a parlor trick, a shuffling of conversational cards, using symbol manipulation sans understanding, sans consciousness, never directly answering, rephrasing and obfuscating any questions which might reveal that it was not, in fact, human. AI still has no consciousness, 60 years later.

     Through the years both the test and the testers have become more sophisticated; the goal remains elusive. But it struck me recently that AI's problems with the Turing test can be analogized to the test a historical novelist must face: they must, like magicians, force a card on their unsuspecting subjects, presenting what they know while hiding what they don't know, convincing the audience they are human; or in the novelists' case,  convincing them that they are humans of another time period. To manage this sleight of hand we are partially dependent upon the audience's complicity of ignorance--what the audience doesn't know, and therefore has to take on faith. And god forgive you if you've chosen an 18th century Gascon woodworker as your murder victim and your book has just been read by a Ph.D. in French literature who wrote her thesis on carpentry techniques in the south of France 1820--1870. You're busted. There's always someone who knows some detail (however picayune) about the era which has eluded you. 

    Because nobody writing today lived then--obviously (unless your novel takes place within living memory). Nobody, not even aforesaid Ph. D., can know what it was like like to live and breathe those wood shavings from three hundred years ago. The only trick we have available is not to duplicate the time period exactly, but to capture enough significant detail that the reader will be lulled, will fill in the lacunae with their imagination. And for that task we turn to a number of available resources. 

      For instance, in my first book, I needed to delay a train from London to Birmingham in the year 1912. I found the answer online--an RAF plane crash that year near Oxfordshire that could be slotted in nicely. For my second book I wanted to know as much about 19th century art forgery as possible. I came across a fascinating book called The Deceivers by Aviva Breifel which painted a picture of female student copyists in the Louvre in 1890s, setting the scene perfectly. For my third book, I wanted Dr. Watson to develop claustrophobia from attempting to explore the Great Pyramid at Giza. This was a rather easy cheat--I had personally developed claustrophobia exploring the Great Pyramid at Giza. We can call these examples significant detail or local color--in AI they're known as training sets. And it is incredible drudge work for humans to train AI. To train it to recognize a dog, for instance, it must be fed thousands of pictures of dogs--labeled as dogs, by humans. AI can't envision a dog, not yet. We can.

Because there's no such thing as a "dog." There are malamutes and mutts, chihuahuas and chows, Great Danes and English bulldogs.  The "dog" exists only in our minds, abstracted and analogized from individual experience. It may be a specific breed of dog, or an amalgam of different dogs, whether a concrete creation or an ever-shifting eidolon. The same is true of a tree. There are oaks and pines and sequoias and aspens and birches. No "tree." But when you say the word, an image comes immediately to mind. I suspect this is the phenomenon which gave rise to Plato's forms.

Plato's forms are the eternal essences, not only things, but qualities: Truth, Beauty, Good.The Platonic ideal may not exist in space, but it does exist within our minds. I would extend this idea to say that there are Platonic ideals of historical eras. Each unit of description, action, or dialogue in a historical novel must be checked against that ideal, that reader's understanding, just as we check both chihuahuas and rottweillers against the platonic dog in our minds--and for each person that dog is a little bit different.

This may seem a handicap for the writer, but it's actually a gift. The writer doesn't have to spend many dreary pages setting each scene. There is a tacit agreement between writer and reader that unless historical differences are specifically detailed , things do not change between time periods. A door is a door, a street is a street, unless we add a brass knocker to the door, or cobblestones to the street. Fashion may change, technology may change but:

You must remember this 

A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.

The fundamental things apply 

As time goes by.

Some things don't seem to change, like human emotions,  hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate, death and taxes. Or if they do, we turn a blind eye to them like footprints in the snow, soon to be wiped out by a new snowfall.

 This extends especially to habits of human thought. I remember reading Michener's The Source in college and thinking it was utter bosh because it portrayed prehistoric characters as using exactly the same processes as modern man. My doubts sprang from the fact that I had just read Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (a fascinating book), which posited that early man had a completely different consciousness. (I won't go into detail, which would require  a much longer piece to do it justice) It was a very convincing argument, though I don't know that it's true. Perhaps our minds have evolved over the centuries, even over the decades. How could Michener have presented the difference, even if he could grasp it? It would be a job of simultaneous translation from an unknown language, fumbling in the dark for a new Rosetta Stone. 

We cannot know the language of the past. We can only fish for a few clues, relying on the good will and cooperation of the reader, to admire our catch. Luckily, we're not subject to a Turing test.  No fooling.

 

AI to the rescue

 I have what I think is a natural revulsion for AI shared by many who would label
themselves progressives or forward-thinkers. It's not that I fear change, but I do fear someone else breaking into the cockpit of my mind and taking over the controls, plundering six thousand years of accumulated human wisdom before I've even had a chance to finger its prettiest baubles. Wait your turn, AI!

But maybe I've been looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe, just maybe, AI will give us the extraordinary opportunity to explore and finally define what makes us human: what can't be copied, can't be programmed, can't be imitated. What makes us, and will forever make us, unique.

Inconceivable!

The computer long ago surpassed us in computational speed, but once it has examined a subject from every angle can it create new angles, new vantage points from which to view a problem, new combinations to the Rubik's cube which are outside the cube? Can it conceive the inconceivable, or even entertain the possibility of such mental gymnastics? (Note to self: do some reading on quantum computing. It could be the linear nature of algorithms which has disadvantaged computers.)

I'm not talking here about the soul or the mind or whatever name you give to the ghost in the machine. I don't believe in ghosts. I'm talking about the human brain and all its concordant systems which I believe encompass every cell in the body. The ghost is the machine. What puts the sapiens in homo sapiens?

I don't begin to know the answer, but it would be a really big adventure to seek it.

On a hunch (will computers ever duplicate hunches?) I would say it have something to do with our capacity, our rapacity, for novelty and surprise. It may be that the last surprise is that there is no last surprise. That sounds like a reason to get out of bed every morning. And standing in the wings might be our propensity for play. Perhaps we are not homo sapiens but homo ludens. (Which is, by the way, the title of a great book.)

(Of course, differentiation could lead to segregation--not of the races this time, but of the minds, artificial and human. Computers might take on the aspect of second class citizens. The ethics involved have already been wrestled with by science fiction writers and may soon have to be addressed by professional ethicists. Anybody but me.)

Arcs and archetypes

     "Characters must have an arc. They must change; they must grow.” 

Writers hear this all the time, and it’s good advice (unless you're writing Seinfeld). But there is one type of character, often wildly popular, which breaks the rules all the time: the archetype.

Characters go on a journey commonly referred to as a character arc. The arc takes our character, usually on a dual journey, often on a journey of discovery, always on a journey of self-discovery. From Oedipus Rex to Emma to Dune, the mystery that every novel has to solve is this: Who is the protagonist?

But archetypes are fixed points. The archetype is a kind of shorthand. They're delivered to your door as a bundle of traits, often outsized, which do not vary within the story, and are often carried over from story to story. As such they lend themselves to the serial, since these traits immediately evoke the character's past stories to the serial reader. Hercule Poirot wanders about straightening things like the obsessive/compulsive he is. Ah, yes, I remember. The archetype is dependable in a way the character can never be. 

Because character is a fixed point, the emphasis can be laid on plot. (Of course the opposite is also true. If one uses an archetypal plot, emphasis can be laid on character. I don't plan to deal with plots or motifs--such as Perseus's winged sandals or Holmes's Persian slipper. I'll confine myself to characters.)

From Odysseus to the Seinfeld gang, from Sherlock Holmes to James Bond, from Madame Defarge to Mata Hari, these bundles of traits make the archetype useful for the writer, imminently recognizable to the reader, and immortal to posterity. The archetype is both flatter and fuller than the three-dimensional character writers are told to strive for.

Of course the archetypes begin with the Greeks (everything does), as heroes, demi-gods working their way toward full humanity. Hercules, Pandora, Oedipus, Achilles, Cassandra, each evokes specific qualities.

As society develops, new archetypes are needed: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, Harlequin.

Part of Shakespeare's genius is in his ability to create so many archetypal figures. One thinks of archetypes like Hamlet, Faust, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and protests that these surely must have an arc. And yet at the core of hamartia is the characters' inability to change to respond to changing circumstances, to the world pressing on them.

Dickens had the gift, too, with his instantly recognizable caricatures that have become bywords: Madame Defarge, Sairy Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Scrooge and Fagin.

And yet these characters can also be quite flexible, so that we writers can repurpose them for our purposes, add to them, make them richer. Think of the major arcana of the tarot: the Fool, the Hermit, the Hanged Man. Tarot readers adapt them to their individual readings, but they can also be adapted by writers. Check out Italo Calvino's tour de force The Castle of Crossed Destinies to see how many changes can be rung upon these ancient figures.

As we come into a new age, new archetypes arise to capture the zeitgeist. There can be no Sherlock Holmes with the development of the police force in the 19th century, no Jeeves without Edwardian society, nor a James Bond without the Cold War and the rise of espionage. 

But does anyone set out to create an archetype? Can anyone create an archetype? You can certainly give it a try, if you have your finger on the pulse of society, if you can surf the trends, both universal and specific, that define us. But it's not really the writer that creates the archetype.

It's the readers.

Are characters sharks?

 

I can't help it. I keep changing little things, adding little things to this manuscript, even as I present it to agents as a completed work. This is a little passage I added last night:

"How do you...how do you know you're not a character?"

"Oh, that's depressingly easy, my dear. Just look back on all those boring, meaningless moments, whole days that dragged away. Characters never experience that. They're sharks, always moving forward."

And I thought, hey, that's profound. But ... do I believe it. And is it true? (Which I will admit are not always the same thing.) 

I should preface this by saying the manuscript in question, Six Characters in Search of a Killer, is one in which fictional characters brush up against real human beings (who are also, of course, fictional characters when seen from the vantage point of the real world). 

Now:

Taking the passage at face value, it seems obviously true. A character, or at least a protagonist, is always marching toward a goal, even is that goal is simply the end of the story--the vanishing point on which our sensibilities are trained. This is true even for characters with negative goals, such as Bartleby the Scrivener or Gregor Samsa, both of whom are hurtling headlong toward their doom, because neither can exist in the world of their respective stories. 

A good story, like a good joke, always moves forward, always cuts to the chase. If we must include those moments, days or years when seemingly nothing happens, we have a handy-dandy economical expression:

Time passed.

It's not always true of secondary characters, at first glance. Dickens is the master of such seemingly immobile characters as Mr. Micawber, trapped in caricature as surely as in carbonite. But even for Micawber, something turns up.

And this does not mean that the protagonist moves in a straight line toward their goal. The great art of the writer is in delay and obstruction. The patron saint of novelists is Lucy Van Pelt. Or possibly Scheherazade.

But even though the shark may be circling the Orca over and over endlessly, he still moves forward.

If this is true, then story can be seen as an obstacle course race as the character sprints toward a goal (which can be blocked out as a series of goals, the first of which may well be finding out what the goal is).

None of this is original thinking (although it may be an original metaphor) but it is a timely reminder.

Or is it? Can you think of any novels which belie this dictum? Lay it on me.

Worlds end at the well

  I can't find it now. Maybe it never existed, or it was from somewhere else entirely. But I always associate the image with the Little Golden Book version of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People (from the Darby O'Gill tales by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh).

I must have been six or seven, just before I read The Wind in the Willows and was banished from the world of picture books entirely. I remember the image as the cover of the book, but it may have been a picture inside, or, as I've said, it could be some other book entirely--

Not exactly what I had in mind

--or it could be that the original image was twisted and reformed by my imagination over the years. Darby O'Gill was probably in the picture, as well as the tiny king of the fairies. I don't remember. I don't care. What I do remember is that it was deep night, and there was a well, and there was a golden light shining up from the well, where no light should ever have shone, an uncanny light, full of deep magic, and I loved the look of it, the beckoning, and I've been trying to capture that light ever since.

Google is not my friend. That search turned up everything but what I was
looking for. And if it was a different book, I have no idea what it might have been, or whether I interpreted the picture wrongly or have misremembered it. Could my memory have transformed a pot of gold into a golden well? Possibly.  It's not really important, is it? What's important is the image of the well, and the light.

     J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a brilliant essay called "On Fairy Stories", in which he argued that real fairy stories are not about fairies, but about the adventures of men on the edge of faerie, as faerie recedes, and the glamor of magic fades, eluding our grasp like a willow-the-wisp. I've found that my favorite fantasy novels fit that bill -- Little, Big, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Charwoman's Shadow, The Crock of Gold, The Beginning Place, even The Lord of the Rings, are all about the receding of magic from our lives. 

And the rim of that well, with the uncanny light overbrimming, is at the edge of faerie.

The labyrinthine page

"You can always edit a bad page.
But you can't edit a blank page."

    

      I've been seeing this quote on social media a lot lately, and it's true as far as it goes. But there are hazards involved with filling up a page, and they often go unexamined. Because every word choice constrains the next choice. "A" rather than "an" means that you have eliminated all words with a vowel in the choice of the following word. The word "I've" in at the head of my first sentence locked in the tense for the following clause. The sentence "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" casts an entire novel irrevocably into the past. "Once upon a time" sets us in a fairy tale. "Once upon a time there was a Martian" warns us to reassess what we know about fairy tales. Each choice narrows the options for the next choice. A manuscript becomes a labyrinth that we seed which grows up behind us with alarming swiftness so that when we look back it's already too high to see over the top. 

     Can't we go back? Can't we change "A" to "an"? Of course. But then we must change "pachyderm" to "elephant", which is not quite the same thing.  And the further we advance, the more we may need to change, the more tremors are sent out under the structure we're creating, and what if it's not a word we need to change, but a sentence, a page, a chapter? There comes a point where we must change our nail scissors for hedge clippers, or a bundle of dynamite. Then, if you use too much blasting powder, the whole edifice may come down around your head.

     Which is not to say that you can't edit a bad page. You must edit a bad page, and you will have many bad pages. And chances are good you may need that bundle of dynamite. Writing is a dangerous business, not for the faint of heart. If, at the end of building your house, you take off your blindfold to discover that you have positioned the toilet in the kitchen, adjustments will have to be made.

     So while you're contemplating the vast ocean of the blank page, take some time to appreciate its calm, unrelenting beauty. Then recall that there are more vessels under the waves than atop them.
 

A Minifesto

 

Call it a minifesto.

Art imitates life, said Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde allowed as he’d gotten it backward: life imitates art. These days, we’re worried that machines imitate art uncomfortably well, but that’s not where the real threat to artists comes from. It’s the audience imitating artists that should worry us. The general public has taken to imitating art with such gusto and aplomb that the artists—read storytellers—are getting crowded out.

Read the entire piece at Criminal Element.

All fiction is historical

 

I have slowly come to the understanding that all fiction is historical fiction in that each character must be placed within their own historical context which, unless all the characters are the same age as the writer, means that every character must come equipped with his own set of historical markers, which may influence his outlook and behavior.

 For instance, in my work in progress, my antagonist is 52, my protagonist 36, and my second lead 28. If my story take place in 2023, that means they were born in 1970, 1986, and 1994 respectively. For each of them, any date before those are closed books, experientially speaking. They have no memories of anything that came before. 

Of course they have access to a wealth of historical information that they can draw on all the way back to the big bang, but they weren’t there at the big bang, and that makes a huge difference. I am 65 in 2023, which gives me a frame of reference which extends back further than my youngest character by nearly 40 years. When seeing the world through her eyes I must see it with one eye closed, so to speak.

And of course their years of birth are hopeless when imaging their frames. What do you remember from the year of your birth? Probably nothing. My first memory is from the age of 3, and a very imperfect memory it is. If we take an arbitrary age of say, ten, we are just beginning to come to grips with the world beyond the schoolyard gate. 

So none of my characters are likely to remember a president before Reagan or a time before personal computers. My youngest character’s earliest memory is Y2k. She won’t really recall a time before Facebook. The U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan most of her life. My protagonist would have had the word “Whitewater” burned into his brain at an impressionable age. He would never hear Carl Sagan or Tiny Tim—especially not on Johnny Carson. 

 None of them would know the USSR, Nixon, the Vietnam War, or the Beatles on a first-hand basis. All of them would have known Queen Elizabeth II and Cookie Monster.

 It’s like Steely Dan’s complaint in the song “Hey, Nineteen,” in which an aging hipster laments of his teen-age date:

Hey, nineteen,

That's 'Retha Franklin,

She don't remember the Queen of Soul.

                                           (You do remember Steely Dan, don't you?)

We’re each speaking a different language, based on experience. Of course, this could be carried further, since no two people, even identical twins, have exactly the same set of experiences, or the same reactions to them. And we can define our characters as precisely (or as generally) as we think necessary. But each of us is caged, to some extent, by the frameset of our lives. That’s a good place for a writer to begin understanding his characters.

Beneath the ice

Monet-The Break-up of the Ice

I want you to think of the book you're reading right now as a river, frozen in the night. You can read everything on the surface of the river. That means all the craft which were yesterday busily plying the river, which have now come to a halt, frozen in place. It means fallen branches and other riverside detritus, partly submerged in the ice. Most important it means the general shape of the river, sinuous and taut at the same time, easily followed and anticipated, at least until the river bends out of sight.

     Perhaps you can spot adventurers on the ice, those familiar enough with its depth to risk ice-fishing or skating along, carving out their initials with the blades of their skates.. It's not for everyone, but watching them explore can help you understand the river better.     

     You can also see something peculiar to you, which is your own reflection, your surroundings, your sky, yourself. You are part of the river, a vital part. You bring your positioning, your angle, your history, without which the river is not complete.

     Here's what you rarely glimpse, though, unless you happen to be a writer, versed in a special way of seeing the river of the book. What we see is the the river beneath the ice, still alive, still flowing, still breathing, still teeming with all the aquatic life. We see words not chosen, passages scrubbed, streams converging and parting, rising and falling. We can't see them crystal-clear, of course, but we are always conscious of the book as a living, ever-changing, ever-busy thing, and we understand how mud or sand or rock in the river-bed fashions the entire river, how the entire-eco-system blends.

    For the writer, a book is never a finished thing, it's always wriggling in the hand. Is there another way to accomplish this attitude? I can't answer that question yea or nay. I'm not even sure it's useful to the reader, no matter how dedicated. But one thing I'd like you to keep in mind: the book is ALIVE.

I'm not insane!

Have saber, will travel.

I mean, I had this figured out long before any German scientists.

"The story of van Gogh's madness was part of a coverup, the authors say, by none other than van Gogh's friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin."

For the full article, 
check out NPR 

John or Paul?

 

Which one are you, John or Paul?

As an artist, which are you?

The raw or the cooked? 

     

 I mean, there are those artists who want to dig into themselves, confess themselves, use themselves as their source material. And then there are artists who hide behind their art, who use their art to please, to put on a hundred different masks. I think it's true no matter what medium you work in: writing, acting, painting, etc. Of course art by it's very nature is a kind of hiding; even if it is a revelation, it's always at one remove. One can always deny it if questioned by Pilate. 

Yet it is also an invitation to follow the clues, no matter how tortuous or obscure, to the soul. So there's a dialectic involved.I adore Lennon, but I'm definitely a McCartney, hiding behind the mask of Dr. John Watson. (Not that an artist can't occasionally break the mold: McCartney's Yesterday or Lennon's For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.

For Writers: Rubik

 

Think of your story as a Rubik's Cube (though each story has a different method of solving, so you can't just memorize one), but you've got to keep twisting and turning and observing the results from every angle. There is one correct solution for each story, one which is satisfying, so don't be afraid to scrap your progress and start all over again.