On Right Speech

Those of you who know me on a daily basis won't be surprised to hear this, but of late I've been drawn to Buddhism.  It's a long story, and something for another blog entry, but not this one.  This is about what the Buddhists call "Right Speech", which they hold to be he best, wisest, and most productive way to talk to one another.   What I'm doing is a rambling riff on the principles of right speech, as they apply to writing and, I guess, how I try to speak to other people.  This passage comes from the Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta translated from the Pali byThanissaro Bhikkhu; the numbering is my own.

And how is one made pure in four ways by verbal action? 1. There is the case where a certain person, abandoning false speech, abstains from false speech. When he has been called to a town meeting, a group meeting, a gathering of his relatives, his guild, or of the royalty, if he is asked as a witness, 'Come & tell, good man, what you know': If he doesn't know, he says, 'I don't know.' If he does know, he says, 'I know.' If he hasn't seen, he says, 'I haven't seen.' If he has seen, he says, 'I have seen.' Thus he doesn't consciously tell a lie for his own sake, for the sake of another, or for the sake of any reward. Abandoning false speech, he abstains from false speech. He speaks the truth, holds to the truth, is firm, reliable, no deceiver of the world. 2. Abandoning divisive speech he abstains from divisive speech. What he has heard here he does not tell there to break those people apart from these people here. What he has heard there he does not tell here to break these people apart from those people there. Thus reconciling those who have broken apart or cementing those who are united, he loves concord, delights in concord, enjoys concord, speaks things that create concord. 3. Abandoning abusive speech, he abstains from abusive speech. He speaks words that are soothing to the ear, that are affectionate, that go to the heart, that are polite, appealing & pleasing to people at large. 4. Abandoning idle chatter, he abstains from idle chatter. He speaks in season, speaks what is factual, what is in accordance with the goal, the Dhamma, & the Vinaya. He speaks words worth treasuring, seasonable, reasonable, circumscribed, connected with the goal. This is how one is made pure in four ways by verbal action.

In a nutshell, then, a way of talking to each other.  I've seen this formulated into questions you might ask yourself before speaking.  You might have another version, another way of addressing how you talk to those around you, but what follows is my version, what I'm getting from this teaching, filtered through some of the things I'm learning as a novelist.  These are questions that I forget to ask myself sometimes, both in my work and in my daily dealings with all of you.  So I'm renewing the promise: I'm going to ask myself these things in the coming days.  I'm going to break the promise, and I'm going to promise them again because long experience as a writer and as a human being tells me that the things below add up to a kind of "right speech", a way for us to use language in books, in discussion, and in all kinds of conversations.  So, before I speak—either aloud or on paper—I'll be asking myself…

1. How do you know this thing you're about to say?  Lots of treatments of Right Speech present this as "Are you sure?"  Lots of people I know, however, are always sure, whether they admit it or not, or whether it ends up that they are actually right.  I'm not much of a postmodernist, but I'm enough of one to know that surety is a pretty high bar to jump (postmodernists are sure of nothing except that everything is uncertain—of that, they're absolutely sure).  So I'll put surety to the test by thinking about the source of my information, "citing my sources".  Do I speak from personal experience?  From anecdote?  From an explanation of the subject by one of you?  Out of something I've read?  Seen on television?  None of these sources—not even FOX News—are always wrong, but when you look at the list, you'll probably come to the same conclusion I have: that none are always right.  Neither am I.  Nor you.  Does that mean you should not voice an opinion?  I don't think so.  What's helpful to me in my version of the question is that it asks me to think about where I learned this, and to proceed with the knowledge that I just might be mistaken.  Those who know me can vouch for my own failings in being humble in this, but it's something I work on as a novelist as well: there's always a danger to a story if the writer tends to preach, to proclaim, to rant.  I find myself more tempted to do so as I get older, because I've lived a long time without seeing certain things get fixed, and sometimes it gets frustrating to know that they are not gonna get fixed, that they are unfixable given the human condition.  But as a novelist, you always consider motive, how the character comes to his behavior and what makes him do the things he does.  If you hijack the plot and characterization to suit your personal agenda, you're setting up one of the ways that a book can go bad.
2. Does what you're saying create concord?  This is the question at which a lot of my community fails, since most of my friends are pretty individualistic, not doctrinaire with their philosophies, theologies, politics.  We tend to characterize the other guy as doctrinaire, of course, but not ourselves—we call it as we see it.  The longer I live as a novelist, the more I understand this question through my own work.  Characters who are doctrinaire become pretty much uninteresting as primary actors in a piece of fiction: they can be great foils or cameos or walk-ons, all of which help define the main characters, the ones you are interested in, the ones who change, question and contradict themselves, and otherwise comprise a good subtle story.  But for all that individualism, they're part of a larger story—events that move toward meaning and a kind of resolution.  Which I think is what I'm looking for in living, even if I don't find it a lot (or even most) of the time.  It's what most people are looking for, at least in my experience.  And our conversation should reflect that.  The idea is to find common ground so discussion can begin: the sutta talks about reconciling those who have broken apart or cementing those who are united, and I think if we are going to live together, that should be in our sights.
3. Is it kind? Of the four questions, this one is probably the least obviously connected to my life as a writer.  Start by saying I follow a number of the Buddhist framings of abstaining from abusive speech.   Language is my medium: I use it to make up people and events, and I should honor it by dedicating myself to its precise and evocative use.  That means a number of things: that I should attend to grammar and usage, so that each sentence is intentional; that I should understand the characters who emerge from my words and honor their motives; that I should honor the writing rather than writing for honor.  Kindness, in its most interpersonal form (because ultimately kindness has to do with how we treat others), leads me to questions of professionalism:  Writers can be exasperating, ego-ridden people, and I have been among the worst offenders.  But it's an ego-based calling to begin with.   We tend to forget that people don't have to read our work, that their generosity in doing so is, in some ways, a call to our gratitude and kindness. It can be humbling to remember that. And those who hold egos in check are usually the most kind and (to me) among the most admirable.  As I write this, I think of my friends Marian Allen, Stephen Zimmer, and most of all Margaret Weis, who is (next to my wife, Rhonda) the best person I know.  One other thing about abusive speech: Being kind doesn't mean you have to agree, just that you should strive for civility.  Lanny Davis, a former advisor to President Clinton, has written on how to re-introduce politeness into American conversation, especially when we are disagreeing: he says to start with the facts, to put them on the table, and then discuss.  Now, sometimes discord in this country (perhaps worldwide, but certainly in this country) often has reaches the point that we can't even agree on some of the facts.  But trying to establish them has a tendency to cool down the conversation.  And folks, please consider the possibility that name-calling is not discussion? I don't tend to cut off conversations unless you're calling people names.  Finally, yes, sometimes there is kindness in correction, but see #1 above before you start correcting? 
4. Is it necessary? The sutta speaks to idle chatter.  I suppose that's gossip and superficiality.  But necessity also suggests that there's a right time to say things. As a novelist you have to learn when to introduce detail, situation.  It's pacing, timing, the soul of good narrative, and something I wrestle with all the time, often unsuccessfully.  But I still attend to it, still think about when it's right to bring something up.  This also is useful to think about when we are in conversation: someone I knew quite well, rest her soul, would say hurtful things, then justify having done so with "I had to say it".  Well, she really didn't have to.  Sometimes I've found it best to be quiet, when people are neither listening nor ready to listen.  If I had offered my opinion, it might have been a kind of "vanity press"—unleashing words into a conversation that are not shaped and chosen and polished to be heard.

A lot of things went down in this blog: writing and Buddha and everyday conversation.  All of which centers on acts of attention.  I'm not great at tuning in, but my work and temperament and life in general improve when I attend to right speech.

On Slowness

In the late 80s and early 90s, I turned out eight books at what was, for me, a rapid pace.  I was involved at the university by that time, and remember a number of people observing that I was "prolific" and "cranking them out"—phrases used with contempt, as though I was spreading germs by sneezing in an elevator.   They always observed this under a mask of objectivity, a mask that didn't hide the curled-up lip very well—the expression of disdain that we academics always use for something we don't understand.

They're wrong and they're right, you know.  At least given my current writing rhythm and rate of production.  I see people caught up with a kind of marketing fever, preoccupied by the fear that they will pass from the knowledge of readers if they don't publish a couple of books a year.  And they, too, have a point:  a friend of mine wanted to do an article on my work for Louisville Magazine back in the late 90s, only to have the proposal rejected because "he hasn't published in five years" (I'd published two books in the five years in question, so whoever said this was mistaken, but the observation tells you something—that publishing is, understandably, fascinated with what is most recent).

But I don't work that way anymore.  Writing a book is, for me, a long gestation, as ideas, plots and subplots, and additional characters introduce themselves over the course of several years, and in ways that connect and deepen what I'm working on, ways I could not hope to attain if I kept up the pace I set twenty years ago. 

I think of two models of creation.  God made the world in seven days, according to Genesis 1 and 2.  I don't believe for a moment that this is a literal account of how the world got done (whether or not it's helpful as a metaphorical account is the subject for someone else's blog); far more reasonable to assume that creation was the slow process all the scientific evidence indicates.  That's how good things get done in nature, and as I grow older, I have come to appreciate that process, to know in my bones that faster is not better.

And no, you young 'uns out there: it's not that I'm old and tired.  My age and weariness may show itself in other things, but a slow writing is to me harder work.  Instead of thinking about a book for six months, I think about it for two or three years, turning its possibilities in my hand, seeing it from various angles, like you'd do when you were a kid tilting a prism to the light.  I love working on books, and I love doing the work at my pace, in my time.

I do want to publish, mind you, and I do dread the possibility of being passed by in an industry that, as Shakespeare said of Time, "hath a wallet at its back/Wherein it keeps alms for oblivion".  But don't be too quick to delight in the fact that I'd like to see my books in print: the best part of this job—hands down, nothing else about it even remotely close—is the writing itself. 

So I'll take my time and see you down the road.  Wait for me.

The Williams Diet: A Summary

Those of you who see me at the Authors Fair in Madison this coming weekend may take note that, yes, I have lost a substantial amount of weight—24 pounds in six weeks by the last count (my weigh-ins are on Friday mornings, and it is a Wednesday as I write this).  In fact, you should take note of the weight loss, damn it, because this is one of the harder things I have done this millennium.

I am not using this occasion to cite obesity statistics (which are appalling, granted) or to wax self-righteous about this accomplishment.  I flat-out have to lose weight, what with a heart condition and the bone structure of an eleven-year-old girl (don’t believe me?  Then check out my wrist size next time we meet).  Heart medicine has put on weight that only dieting and exercise can take off, and when I woke from unsettling dreams to see that my identity had been stolen by a dumpy, 75-year-old Irishman, I decided it was time to transform.

Here is how I've done it, but first a caveat.  This is not a pleasant journey, and if you have another way, please choose it, with my blessings.   Choose it FOR YOURSELF, if you feel you need it. In return for those blessings (which I give you gladly, no matter if you keep this part of the bargain), I ask only that you not share with me your far easier, sleeker and sexier method of weight loss.  The world is filled with internet experts, and my version, though painful, has goddamned worked for me this far.  

Here's my schedule:

7 am: Slimfast

12 noon: Slimfast

2-5 pm: Blind, craving-fueled rage at all around me—students, friends, family, the cosmos—telling myself the uncomfortable truth that it is not real hunger, it's just having been spoiled by too much to eat.

5-6 pm: Supper with reasonable, rest-of-the-world portions.  Not the Amurrikan ones where you can't see the news from over the tumulus of carbohydrates on your plate.  All the while wishing you could eat until your spouse says, "That's it, honey.  The town is entirely out of food."

8-10 pm:  Go to sleep.  The earlier the better, to stop thinking about it.

I bought this plan on the long term.  Reached fifty years old without a concept of portion size or calories.  Now I know that "portion size" = "leaving the table hungry". And whatever you like has too much calories.  So I have to stop putting so much of what I like into my mouth.

I believe I'll reach my target weight, which is still ten pounds away.  And then maybe I can shed some of my housecat mentality, which is basically yearning for the next meal and the next nap.  Yes, it's distracted me from my best work, but I figure my worst work may come after a fatal heart attack, so I'll put up with this until I'm ten pounds lighter.  Then see if I can eat something I like once in a while, and weigh every Friday to derail the Fat Irish Express back to the weight I was at when this whole irritating business started.  I do believe this is a craving, like when I quit smoking, different only in the fact that, with the diet, I'm giving up some of what's good for me because it's too much.  It's a space that can be filled with other things.  

Like compliments on how good I look.  So tell me that.  Even if you don't mean it.

On Cutting Some Slack

Even my most libertarian friends, with their dreams of desert freeholds or serene isolation from the rest of us, have to own up, sooner or later, that we live in a community.  That unless you are Ted Kaczynski, making bombs and manifestos in an isolated cabin, you'll have to deal with people in a way that is civil and constructive, even if it isn't always friendly.

This is where slack-cutting is of value.  The quality that lets slide the irritating quirks of others, usually with phrases like "Oh, that's just [him/her]" or "I have to work with [him/her] later, so I'll let it go".

Public hostility is different.  Recently I was rudely and aggressively insulted in front of a large crowd.  I had respected the offender, and in some ways I still do—in ways that will be enough to work with her if I am called upon to do so.  After her tantrum I can no longer like her, but I've cut slack to a practical ground, where any contact I have with her can be useful, though I am reasonably sure it can no longer be pleasant.

Fiction writing—or at least some of the characterization that a fiction writer does—can begin in cutting slack.  You let things slide because you're interested in seeing where they head, because you realize they may make good copy up the road.  But it's good as well for people who do other things.

I tend to pace in the classroom.  It's because I can't stand still when the ideas are good.  I can see that it might unsettle someone: twice in twenty-five years of teaching, people have complained, but for the most part my students put up with it, out of their own kindness and graciousness and, I certainly hope, a returned respect for me and for my forgiveness of late papers, class-cutting, and improvised apologies and excuses for the aforementioned.  I also hope they get excited by the ideas as well, and realize we all have different ways of making that known.

Still, when I saw a student evaluation that expressed real discomfort with my pacing—that went on about it for a paragraph or so—I took stock of my habit.  This was mid-semester, on a large internet site, so it gave me time to correct my behavior to less discomfort a student who was apparently very upset about it.  I tried to check the pacing—a practice I found a little distracting myself, since I had to call myself out on a number of occasions—but I figured the class was about the students instead of about me, so I could adjust as much as I could.  And the student mentioned that it had gotten better…in the four subsequent evaluations where she registered complaints that it had happened to begin with.

Yes, I said 'she', because it wasn't hard to figure out who it was.  She dropped pure factual information into the paragraph—the course she was taking from me, and that she was taking yet another simultaneously—so I knew instantly.  Don't ever think you're that opaque on anonymous evaluations.  She graduated before three of the five complaining paragraphs were published, but in her aftermath she left me thinking:

First time, maybe the second time, the problem was about me.  By the fifth time, it's about you, my dear.

Which speaks to cutting slack.  One thing we can learn is how to do it.  Because the things about someone else are sometimes about you.  I've learned it too often in my own life, made too many mistakes, indulged too many bad quirks and habits, to not hope for slack from those of you I have offended.  Which doesn't mean that your own little performances won't show up in something I write someday.  

 Because that's the way I roll.

Downton Abbey: Some Thoughts

So, we've caught up with Downton Abbey around the Williams house,  and the verdict is still, all in all, favorable.  Rhonda loves period narration, the Austen-like feel of the show, the nuance of character, the visual sumptuousness.  I agree with much of that (for some reason, I've never been as big a Jane Austen fan as a number of my friends, though I'll immediately own up to her brilliance), but for me, the first two seasons were (so far) preferable to the one we are currently watching.

Here's why.

The first two seasons I found more centered on history, the approach and disaster of the Great War.  It might be just my own interests—I'm fascinated by the event, and have expressed its crucial importance in every damn Modernism class I've ever taught—but it was important to the show as well, in that historicity is what makes it rise above soap opera.

Oh, the history is still there—Branson's Fenian fervor and Edith's budding feminism—and I'm still hoping those situations will blossom in the story line rather than remaining clever window-dressing.  And the show's treatment of slow democratization and British class bigotry (present then, present now) always makes for good story.  The broad characterization that is one of the strengths of British comedy holds up well here reminding me how many British actors are versatile and genuine pros, and how we don't see enough of that on diva-haunted American television.  And yes, I know, this is some of the better programming out of Britain, that a large portion of their television diet is as bad as ours, but they don't have hundreds of channels—hundreds!—filled with complete crap, thank you, and at least they can put forth some literate scripts that you can see performed without your having to pay a small fortune for HBO or Showtime.  I do, by the way, succumb to the PBS-watcher's mythology that the Brits are more literate than we are, because when it comes right down to it, they are, along with the rest of the industrialized world.  It's more evident to us because we speak their language.

So that's the praise: historicity, acting, a verbally attractive script.  But I'm concerned in this third season that it's less and less distinguishable from, say, Falconcrest (which I didn't watch, but saw trailers where well-dressed women were slapping each other. I think it was Falconcrest.  Perhaps Dynasty.  The point being that, at least to my tastes, there's a vanishing point in soap operas in which one is indistinguishable from another).  Soaps are a different form of storytelling from historical fiction, and when you bring them both together, when you cross genres, each should be schooled by the other.  Here's hoping that the rest of this season, and all of the one that follows, bring Downton Abbey back to what I was liking so much as it gathered speed.

What I Learn from Fiction

Having recently passed through (one might say “survived”) a blog tour concerning my novel Vine, it seems like a pretty good time to address one part of the experience.

The reviews, which were mixed/favorable, tended to major on the things that I usually hear.  People liked the things I expected them to like, and had reservations about the things that usually draw misgiving.  Said misgivings often major on the texture of the language (I write in long sentences because they slow the eye and make one think in nuances; I sometimes use obscure words—I was once called a “poseur” by an Amazon reader, which made me smile, because I believe that any English speaker who uses the word “poseur” is, well, a poseur). Others contend that “nothing happens”, and I will admit that there are few swordfights, rappels down the side of skyscrapers, and cold-cocking of a dozen ninjas in a long bout of foot-fighting; for me, “what happens” to most people—the events that define their lives—are nuanced changes in the way they understand things, the way they regard each other and themselves.  That being said, there’s a virtue in more thunder and lightning, and I’m working toward it. In summary, one of the mixed reviews objected that the book was not for the “casual reader,” and though to me that is neither a badge of honor nor a valid critique, I’m fine with my work being characterized that way.

What I don’t get, however, is the insistence on finding a character with whom you can “identify”, or at least how “identify” is used when people say that. We all identify with characters in fiction, but I submit we have to do part of the work in order to do so: and in that lies the cool part.

You have to stretch.  It’s one of the ways that fiction deepens your understanding, but it’s not like mainstream TV, where the viewer can passively identify with characters so broad and typical that you can dilute almost any of your own personal traits to fit that character on the screen.  In short, you identify passively, because that’s the way the character is designed—to reach the widest market.   

I like what  fiction does better.  How it takes you out of your comfort zone, and, with a little work on your part, brings you to understand a character with whom you  don’t readily “identify”.  How it expands your prospects.

In VINE I made up a character named Bucky Trabue.  A chain-smoking, right-wing Republican operative with a dose of outrage and corruption.  Now, in real life, I would be appalled every time one of his candidates won office, but in the book I began to like him: I framed my imagination to see the world the way Bucky saw it, and I came out understanding him, and in a way identifying with him.  Certainly liking him, and emerging maybe a bit deepened from the encounter.  He has a part in the new thing I’m working on: I liked him enough to ask him back.

You may not want to stretch with the characters you read about.  May want to sit back, relax, and “identify” in a generalized way.  And no, I’m not criticizing you for making that choice.  Just saying that not all fiction makes that kind of transaction, and that meeting someone different than you—in real life or in fiction—can be a good and healthy rendezvous.