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Genres, Conflict, and Cartesian Spaces

I have been thinking hard about what I like about the books I like because, lately, I have found myself reading a lot of current books I don’t particularly care for and I wonder what is happening.

I published Fifty-Third and Dorchester earlier this year. I have been immersing myself in writing and the meta-world of the craft of writing. These days, everyone has a theory or method for writing a sure-fire hit. I read and listen to several websites and podcasts a week on writing craft. I have shelves of books on every aspect of the craft. Like me, every aspiring writer these days is flooded with advice. MFAs in creative writing abound. Compared to a decade ago, writers are much better educated on craft.

But I have to ask, why don’t I care much for the recently written books I read? My poor choices? A bad attitude? Out of step with the times? Or has political air pollution put a permanent sour taste in my mouth? Chronic dysphoria?

All of those are plausible, but I think it is something else because there are authors whose books continue to bring me pleasure. For example, I reread Dorothy Sayers first Peter Whimsey story last week and enjoyed it immensely. I saw flaws and superficialities that I did not notice the last time I read it, probably twenty years ago, but these are minor hypersensitivities that come from sweating over the imperfections in my own work. The issues highlight the many things that Ms. Sayers got right rather than detract.

My guess, which I intend to explore, is that current writers have lost sight of some sensibilities that older writers took for granted. Current literary crafters are painfully aware of a certain kind of conflict. The craft books almost all say that every scene, paragraph, and word must convey the striving of the character toward some goal or the reader will lose interest. The entire text must be plotted in a polar coordinate system that points to whatever it is that the character wants. This is robust underpinning. But has a bit of ennui slipped in? Is this the only story that can captures a reader’s fancy? Is it possible that a multidimensional cartesian space can be equally or more compelling?

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Inflection Point

The first derivative of a function at an inflection point is zero. Visually, an inflection point is a flat line tangent, a point where the value of the function is going neither up nor down. The forces of increase and decrease are balanced and for a moment, the function is unchanging. The Yijing calls it the balance of yin and yang. Some functions are always at an inflection point. These functions are constant, like the gravitational constant throughout the universe, or step-wise, like the amount of postage on an old-fashioned letter that is 49 cents or 70 cents, never in between.

Functions that are always at an inflection point are oddballs. In nature, in life, things change gradually, always going up or down. In most lives, inflection points are rare: the instant when a potential addict decides to take or not to take that hit of heroine, the moment when a college student decides to study classics instead of chemistry, when an employee decides to tell the bosses they are wrong. The Yijing calls it the balance of yin and yang. But we have all experienced inflection points, sometimes realizing what they are at the time, sometimes not. They are easy to spot in the rearview mirror, but hard to see through the windshield.

If your life is not at an inflection point, it will continue to go sour, or get better and better, but, most often, you eventually run into an inflection point and fortunes change. If you don’t like the direction and don’t accept free will, all you can do is wait for the next inflection point and hope it goes your way.

Some of us accept free will and look for ways to induce inflection points. How can you induce an inflection point in your life? Or recognize one when it arrives?

If I could tell you, I would control your destiny. But life is far too complex for me, or anyone else, to control anyone else’s future. But I do believe we all have the power to look at ourselves. In fact, try as we might, we can’t avoid knowing what we feel, what is happening around us. There may be forces we don’t comprehend or detect, but we still know something about what we feel in our surroundings and we can use that knowledge to change our direction.

Inducing an inflection point in our life is possible but hard. You must use every faculty as intensely as you can, and when you do, you do not know what will happen. You don’t know what the new direction will be, only that it will be different. But there have been times in my life when I have known that I had to make my life change, and I changed it. Sometimes I liked the results, sometimes not. That’s life in the vine maples.

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Christmas

Hypocrisy and a hard heart comes easy in this season. For decades, the North Korean government has behaved like malicious frat boys with nuclear weapons. They treat their people like draft animals and can’t figure out how to grow enough food to avoid famine, something that, prior to them, has been done on the Korean peninsula for centuries. No Christmas presents for you! I still sympathize a little with them for being upset at a movie that shows their sitting leader’s head exploding, but their response was juvenile. Someday, their silly attempts at bullying could get them exterminated.

This is a nice build up to Christmas, the time of forgiveness, peace, and good cheer. I would like to send Santa Claus to North Korea. The kind of gifts that Santa delivered in nineteenth and early twentieth century in the west would serve well: simple toys, warm clothing, extra food for the bleak months to come. These are the things everyone should have at Christmas.

North Korea is not the only place that needs a good Christmas. The Ebola countries, the places where school children are killed in the name of holiness or principle. Everywhere that people hunger and suffer. Wishing many of them happy holidays is a cruel joke because, given the world, there will no happy holiday, any happy holiday, not just Christmas, New Years, Chanukah, Kwanza, for them for a long time.

Nevertheless, this is the season, and we must try. I will say “Merry Christmas” because that is my tradition. I won’t try to utter the greetings of the other traditions because I would be saying words that can only be understood fully when stamped on the heart, although I know that the feeling behind all the other greetings is the same heartfelt good wish that I somberly deliver now.

Merry Christmas to all the world, may your belly be full, your bed warm; may you be wrapped in the love of your family and community, and filled with joy.