Fantastic Metropolis

I’ve seldom liked a story that was just itself, even a (so called) good story. I don’t know what resonance is, exactly, but I feel it when I read it and I get goose bumps when I find it and I get goose bumps when I write it.

Usually that’s my reason for writing. That’s what turns me on about a story idea—that it means more than it says. As I start writing, I can tell by the first paragraph whether I should go on with it. If I get that trembly feeling I know I’m hitting something more than just the story idea.

My friend calls this allegory, but I don’t relate to that word. I think of it as resonance instead, because a story is either an allegory or it isn’t, whereas there are all degrees of resonance. There can be a lot or a little.

I set myself off on something that resonates and follow where it leads. Simply by the feel. I usually know when I’m off track. Then I have to back up and regroup (and I have to do this three or four times a story) or the story won’t move.

Whenever I sit down to write too consciously (and I do sometimes) it ends up with no resonance. It looks and feels planned. When I do that it has no… what? Underwear? Underside? This is why Kafka is my favorite writer. Kafka’s stories aren’t about what they’re about. I like them for what they don’t say. Sometimes Stephen King stories sound like Kafka stories but they’re only about the stories you see. They’re only about their surface… about what happens. Kafka’s stories are not about their stories.

There are all degrees of this. Some stories are almost all underwear/underside and some stories have very little or none. I’m mostly conscious of it when there’s none. And I’ve done some of those over the years especially in my earlier writing. Usually there’s at least a little resonance in my stories.

Usually I end up with a story with little resonance when I try too consciously to write something that will sell. Recently I threw a space ship into a story just to stop getting rejections that said, “We already have too many fantasies in stock.” (A nice way of getting rejected.) That story has no meaning for me. It was a lesson, too. I’m too cut and dried when I try consciously to write something.

One problem with counting on your subconscious too much is that if something knocks you off your perch you have a hard time climbing back on it in order to write again, since, in a way, it’s not your conscious mind you’re writing with.

I tell my students that first thing because we don’t want to say anything in class that will stop a person from writing. I tell them they must be critical but they must be gentle with each other. I tell them the purpose of the class is to make people go out enthusiastic to write more.

But sometimes there’s a good reason for being blocked. It happened to me when I took a class with the poet Kenneth Koch. I learned so much I couldn’t write for six months, but that was because I had to absorb what I’d learned. It took six months of mulling it over before I could write at all. After the six months my writing started coming out in a new way. I couldn’t say what was different after those six months. I went into the class writing satire and fantasy and came out writing satire and fantasy but it was entirely different.

My more realistic stories have a different purpose… a people purpose. I don’t care so much if they resonate or not. Their whole purpose is the characters. Or they resonate in a different way. I can get all shaky from characters alone, too.