As the World Stearns

If you read enough behind-the-scenes writing by famous authors, you’re probably over-familiar with the “Why I Write” essay. Sometimes these are pretty damn inspirational (I’m thinking of Paul Auster’s pieces collected in The Red Notebook), and other times a wee bit indulgent and hateful (probably best not to name names, sorry). But it is all too rare to come across an essay about why we read.

For me, it has always been about What Happens Next, about storytelling at its most fundamental, that breathless and then, and then, and then. It can be easy to forget that, sometimes—I become enamored with a writer’s wit or pyrotechnics or form-bending exercises, and I spend ages hacking through wildernesses of metafiction, giving my brain a workout on playgrounds devised by genius loons. (I’m thinking, of course, of the usual suspects: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Auster—really, this shelf is endless, and endlessly fascinating.) Or I meander slowly through finely wrought character studies, in books that are about the nuances of personality and make high drama out of small moments. Whatever—these are all good, worthy books.

But while in the midst of them, I sometimes forget about the visceral joys of plain old story. Until I stumble upon it again and recall, Oh yeah! This is what it’s all about.

Which brings me to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I began reading this the other day, and it’s a struggle to pull myself away from it. Yes, it is wordy and long and taxes my vocabulary, but good God! It moves like it’s on speed. Things happen, pretty much from the first few pages. Our naif hero d’Artagnan takes offense and challenges a stranger to a duel; the stranger can’t be bothered because of a mysterious plot he’s involved in with the beautiful Milady; d’Artagnan suffers a theft of the thing he most prizes in the world. And that’s all in the first chapter. I don’t know where it’s going, but I can’t wait to get there.

Dumas keeps the reader on a need-to-know-basis, telling us no less than but no more than we need at any particular point in the story, filling us in as things develop. He perfectly illustrates the tried-and-true reliable story mnemonic  ABDCE—Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending. That formula is usually used to discuss the short story, but it applies just as much to the novel, and to sections within novels: engage readers with action, parcel out just enough background to pique our interest, escalate to some sort of breaking point, get out.

We can all learn a thing or two from that kind of story. Speaking of which, I’m going to get back to it.

(Back in the mid-nineties, I taught a series of workshops for the late, lamented Writing Center in San Diego. On the back of the initial handout, I always included the following, which I labeled “Our Credo.”)

Writers write, and they write, and they go on writing, in some cases long after wisdom and even common sense have told them to quit. There are always plenty of reasons—good, compelling reasons, too—for quitting, or for not writing very much or very seriously. (Writing is trouble, make no mistake, for everyone involved, and who needs trouble?) But once in a great while lightning strikes, and occasionally it strikes early in the writer’s life. Sometimes it comes later, after years of work. And sometimes, most often, of course, it never happens at all. Strangely, it seems, it may hit people whose work you can’t abide, an event that, when it occurs, causes you to feel there’s no justice whatsoever in the world. (There isn’t, more often than not.) It may hit the man or woman who is or was your friend, the one who drank too much, or not at all, who went off with someone’s wife, or husband, or sister, after a party you attended together. The young writer who sat in the back of the class and never had anything to say about anything. The dunce, you thought. The writer who couldn’t, not in one’s wildest imaginings, make anyone’s top ten possibilities. It happens sometimes. The dark horse. It happens, lightning, or it doesn’t happen. (Naturally, it’s more fun when it does happen.) But it will never, never happen to those who don’t work hard at it and who don’t consider the act of writing as very nearly the most important thing in their lives, right up there next to breath, and food, and shelter, and love, and God.

—Raymond Carver (introduction, Best American Short Stories 1986)