WILLIAM FAULKNER'S SECRET TO WRITING SUCCESS

At Meilori's, 

that haunted jazz club which is never too far from where dreams have died, 

I was playing chess with the ghost of William Faulkner.

The fog gathered near.  

The jazz murmured low in the shadows.  

The torches beckoned to all who wander lost in the dark of their soul.

I must have spoken that thought aloud, 

for Faulkner said low, "How do you know they are so lost?"

I smiled sadly, "On such a night, if they could be home, they'd already be there." 

He returned my smile.  "Just so.  Just so."

I asked, "Why weren't you at the poker game last night?"

Faulkner snorted, "Hemingway gets too morose about November's writing contest."

"So you approve of NaNo?"

"Goodness, no!  It is a horrid waste of 30 precious days that will never come again.  

The dead know all too well how fleeting life can be."

I nodded, "Mark Twain says each day is a coin we can spend any way we wish, but ...."

Faulkner finished with me, " ... you can only spend it once."

He sighed, 

"But have those contest participants bought anything of lasting value with those 30 coins?"

"So you agree with Hemingway?"

"No.  He lived a full life and should know Mankind has always looked for the secret elixir, the hidden keys, the lost path to success."

Faulkner smiled bitterly. 

 "Not that they exist, mind you, but we want them to.  We live in denial of the simple fact 

that the true path to success, whether in writing or in any other endeavor, 

is paved with courage, imagination, and persistence."

He blew pipe smoke into the shadows. "And it is a lonely road."

I sighed, "For me it has been."

Faulkner murmured,

 "So it is understandable that so many writers think they have found the key to becoming writers 

in this joint 'group hug' as Hemingway so colorfully and callously calls this contest."

He frowned as I moved my knight in a move he had not foreseen. 

 "But the truth is as elusive as smoke in the night.  Sometimes you can smell it in the air, but it slips through your fingers."

Faulkner took my knight in a move that this time I hadn't seen coming and smiled,

 "But I can tell you and your electronic friends the simple secret to writing success."

"It's not nice to tease a struggling writer."

"Oh, I am quite sincere.  The simple secret is this:

Write of an old thing in a new way."

In response to my frown, Faulkner said, 

"The oldest lodestone to literature is the human heart in conflict with itself.  

From Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams that lodestone has been the compass that led the way to riveting stories."

He tapped the chessboard with the stem of his pipe. 

"Only that is worth writing about, worth the agony, and the sweat of wresting something from nothing."

Faulkner leaned forward, stabbing my chest with the pipe stem.

"Leave no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

 the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - 

 love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

 
Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

You write not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

of victories without hope and,

worst of all, without pity or compassion. 

Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

You write not of the heart but of the sex glands."

He wrinkled his nose as if to sneeze.  

"When I was in Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn would point out the latest hit to me and my fellow script writers

and say, "I want the same thing ... only different."

I smiled, 

"No stories of young boys or girls fated to save the world, no wallflower girl courted by supernatural heart-throbs, no ...."

Faulkner said, 

"Dare to save your character's world in a way not seen before and with imagination not cookie-cutter formulas.'

I moved my last knight, positioning it to take his King.  "Checkmate."

He tipped over his King and arched an eyebrow, "Only a callow soul takes advantage of the dead."

The ghost of Mark Twain pulled up a seat and crowed, "Why I do that all the time!"

Faulkner snorted, "I rest my case."

IWSG's ELLEN JACOBSON and the ghost of WILLIAM FAULKNER

Come May 2nd

You Will See A Haunting Tale of This Truth

in the HERO LOST Anthology

Amazon

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William Faulkner, ghost, here:

Roland is sleeping, 

his head settled on his folded arms as he sprawls in front of his electronic journal ... 

laptop he calls it.

I wanted to check in on him. 

We ghosts have a fondness for him. He listens.

You'd be surprised how few undead or living do that. 

Most spirits and living souls just wait impatiently for you to take in a breath so they can jump in with their concerns.

Samuel Clemens couldn't wait to inform me how Roland had gone wrong with his last post. 

Old Sam seemed sure he knew how he'd gone wrong.

And as usual that old tale-spinner was both right and wrong.

Like Roland, I taught creative writing in a university. 

I had been so sure I had a firm grasp of reality and how to portray it. 

Death showed me that only the dead see clearly.

So I do know where Roland went wrong, where so many of us writers go wrong:

People do not read to see what you think or to learn about you. 

No.

They read to learn about themselves, to come into contact with who they truly are.

They read that which speaks of their own hopes, their own dreams, and their own fears.

If a tale resonates with the haunting music of their unhealed wounds and silent insecurities, 

they will be drawn to it as if to a magnet. 

Only that story which tells of a heart in conflict with itself is truly literature.

That is why you must read, my friends. 

Read. Read everything -- 

trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.

Then write. If it's good, you'll find out.

If it's not, throw it out of the window and start again wiser.

Don't be 'a writer'.

Be writing.

A bus station is where a bus stops. 

A train station is where a train stops. 

On my desk, I have a work station.

And to work well you must write with the embers of truth stinging your eyes.

You can have 13 people looking at a black bird and none of them will get it right. 

No one individual can look at truth.

Even simple truth. Look deep enough, and the simplicity disappears in the murky depths.
 
Truth blinds you. 

It is too much for one set of perceptions to take in. To a man with rose-tinted glasses, the whole world is rose.

And so it is with the writer looking at Man.

We call ourselves Homo Sapien, the reasoning animal. But Man is not made of reason.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
 
One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is its own misfortune as well.


And so all human behavior is unpredictable.

Considering Man's fragility and the ramshackle universe he functions in, how could it be otherwise?

So how does that affect you as a writer?


1) The writer must not set himself up as judge:

He must focus on action, the character's behavior.

Maybe your protagonist, like so many people, has no concept of morality,

only an integrity to hold always to what he believes to be facts and truths of the human condition.

 
2) The character does what his nature dictates.

He acts not as the writer would, not as a man should do, but what he will do --

maybe what he can't help but do. Which leads me to my greatest fear:

 
3) I fear that Man is losing his individualism, 

his sense of self, in doing what the herd does in order to stay safe.

Which is why I do not belong to anything besides the Human Race, and I try to be a first rate member of that.

 
4) You are first rate as a human being and a writer if:

you do the best you can with what talents you have to make something positive that wasn't there yesterday.

How do you do that you ask:

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. And he makes his home of the stones of his efforts.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home until I realized that home to a writer is where his mind, his heart is.

 
5) Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. 

Strive to thrive where you are. "How?" you ask again. And I will tell you:

 You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. 

Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

You have to have courage. Courage is not so hard to have in writing if you remember that:

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection.

 
6) I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. 

If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better.

This is the healthiest condition for an artist. 

That's why he keeps working, trying again: 

he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.

Of course he won't. Which leads us to the next point.

 
7) The phenomenon of writing is its hermaphroditism:
 
the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body

and the necessary opponent, the blank page, is merely the bed he self-exhausts on.

 
8) I learned in the university as did Roland: 

You can learn writing, but you cannot teach it. 

A paradox but true despite that.

And what have I learned from my novels?

I learned how to approach language, words:

not with seriousness so much as an essayist does,

but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite;

even with joy, as you approach women: 

perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

Are you a writer? Really? Then, what are you doing about it?

Go, write. And remember:

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

And that's why a dream is not a very safe thing to be near...

I know; I had one once.

It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough,

somebody is going to be hurt. 

But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
***
The land of Longmire and McCord:

 

CURSE OF THE GODS_William Faulkner, ghost, here

"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."- William Faulkner.



The ghost of William Faulkner here:


When I told ghost stories to my nieces and nephews

at Rowan Oaks, I never thought I would become one.

Would you like to read three of those stories?  Used for under 99 cents!

http://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Rowan-Oak-Faulkners-Children/dp/0916242072

Reading the latest headlines, I have come to believe each day now is a deadly Halloween.  What are you living to do?

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.


But there is a terrible irony in that.

It took me dying to understand life. I thought I knew what life was as you think you know.

You are wrong.
 
Life is ephemeral, elusive, and beyond the capacity of words to adequately convey.

Your worldview, as was mine, is as simplistic and crude as an Etch-A-Sketch rendering of the Mona Lisa.


I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express life,

but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.


You believe McCord is only a creature of Roland's mind.

Roland's Lakota blood brings to life all to which he invests his love and care. 


But then, how can you explain that I can remember meeting McCord in New Orleans in the 1920's?


Is the power of the spirit, of the mind such that it can transcend time itself?

I could try to explain what my ghostly senses have seen but it would be as pointless as giving caviar to an elephant.


Instead I will write of that time when I still was alive, still saw as a human sees.


The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means 

and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

And that is what I will try to do now for you.


The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel.

In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. McCord offered it to me. And I took it for awhile.


I got more than money for that job, I received a way of looking at life that transformed me into the writer that I became.

McCord became my Socrates. He hardly ever spoke but guided my thoughts with a stray word or question, letting me come up with my own conclusions.


The first thing he taught me: the past is never dead. It's not even past.


The second thing he helped me see: the salvation of the world is in man's suffering. The scattered tea goes with the leaves, and every day a sunset dies.

One day during the time while McCord and I walked and talked in New Orleans – or I talked and he listened - 

I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing to himself.

I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing to himself.

This was not our usual meeting place. We had none.

He lived in his French Quarter night club, Meilori's. And without any special prearrangement, we would meet somewhere between his club and the Square after I had something to eat at noon.


I would walk in the direction of his club. 

And if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I would simply sit down on a bench where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out.


I can see him still –


A ramrod straight man in his late forties, clad entirely in black: 

black broadcloth jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His boots were black, as well, and polished so that the sun struck fire from them. 

Even his Stetson was black.


All of which made the silver star on his jacket stand out like a campfire in the night. It was said he had once been a Texas Ranger.

He never talked to me of those days - at least not before that afternoon.


This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing. I sat down beside him and asked what was so funny. He looked at me for a long moment.


"I am," he said.


And to me that was the great tragedy of his character, for he meant it. He knew people did not believe he was who the legends claimed. How could he be?


They thought him an actor paid to play a part.


Except when the darkness came for them, then they came running, praying he was what the tales on the street whispered: a monster who killed monsters.

He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to hold him in scorn and derision ... in the daylight.


In spite of that he worked earnestly and hard at helping each wounded soul he met.

It was as if he said to himself: 

'They will not hurt as I have hurt. I will show them that they matter because their pain matters to me.'


"Why do you speak of yourself like that?" I asked.


"Today marks the hundred year anniversary," he said.


"Of what?"



"Drop by my table at the club this evening, and I will tell you."


And that evening I did just that. We sat, with a bottle now, and we talked.

At first he did not mention the hundred year anniversary. It was as if he was slowly working himself up to something long avoided.


We talked of everything it seemed.

How a mule would work ten years for you willingly and patiently just for the privilege of kicking you once. How clocks kill time, that only when the clocks stop does time come to life.


And how given a choice between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.


When he had said those last words, McCord met my eyes with his own deep ones and said,

"There is something about taking a stand against the darkness, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."


His eyes seemed to sink into his wolf's face. "But there is a price."

"What price?" I whispered.


"To understand the world, you must first understand the human heart. But none of us understand that mystery. So we make mistakes."

He closed his eyes. "And those mistakes kill those we love."


He rose from the table, walking into the shadows and speaking to me from over his shoulder.


"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought for the reasons you tell yourself. The battlefield only reveals your own folly and despair. And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

The darkness swallowed him, and the night suddenly seemed to be my enemy.

***

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In the French Quarter of the Roaring Twenties, there is a strange night club owner whom society shuns ...

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Travel back to the FIRST and listen to Samuel McCord recount a tale of horror, love, sacrifice, and redemption to a young William Faulkner ...

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IWSG_THE SILK ROAD of WILLIAM FAULKNER'S GHOST

William Faulkner, ghost, here.

Alex Cavanaugh has established this fine tradition:

Writers supporting one another as do the stones in an arch bridge -
http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/

Roland is off bringing rare blood to the ailing, so I am here to stand in his stead:

Why do I title my support article, THE SILK ROAD?

The Silk Road (from German: Seidenstraße) or Silk Route

 is a modern term referring to a historical network of interlinking trade routes

across the Afro-Eurasian landmass that connected East, South, and Western Asia

 with the Mediterranean and European world, as well as parts of North and East Africa.

 Extending 4,000 miles, the Silk Road got its name from the lucrative Chinese silk trade along it, which began during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD).

Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, India, Persia, Europe and Arabia.

Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and various technologies, religions and philosophies,

as well as the bubonic plague (the "Black Death"), also traveled along the Silk Routes.

The path you take in the quest for your novel is the Silk Road for you.  It is both a short path and a long one:

from the head to the heart

to the fingers.

But most writers run afoul of a roadblock from the head to the heart. 

Or if they traverse that perilous plain, they will find only staleness at the end of their fingers.

My advice for that?

Get it down.

Take chances.

It may be bad, but it is the only way you can do anything good. 


The Silk Road to your novel will demand bravery of you.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.  

It will lead you places you never expected to go, bringing you wisdom or the death of your dreams,

depending on the choices you make, the people with whom you converse.

We writers are a lonely group as the ghost of Samuel Clemens pointed out yesterday. 

Dreams have only one owner at a time.

That's why dreamers are lonely.

We are drawn to those who understand the fire in our souls ... even though sometimes we deny that attraction.

In the '20's, two cities called out to yearning writers:
Paris and New Orleans.

I told myself I was going to New Orleans to get a job on a ship going to Europe. 

I was lying to myself.  Why, we lie so much to ourselves, we could do it for a living.

I wanted to be with people with the same problems and interests as my own,

who would not laugh as I told of what I was trying to accomplish with my prose as so many of the Philistines did back then.

To succeed on the original Silk Road, you had to learn the languages of the nations along that route.

Your own Silk Road will demand you learn the languages of those of whom you write.

It helps if you like people, for you will listen beneath their words

to the aches and longings that they cannot or dare not bring into the light of conversation.

I spent a lot of time with my uncle. 

And every 4 years, he would have to barn-storm to get re-elected as judge. 

I did not nor do I care about politics.  But I cared about the lined faces I saw in my uncle's audiences.

Theirs were not regional problems. 

A man from there had the same struggles

as do we all:

the struggle against his own heart, against the hearts of his fellows

And the struggle to stay the course of the truths by which we must all live.

Truth.


That is a much mocked word in this relative world of today.

"Oh," people say, "what makes something a truth for you does not work for me."

Really? 

Courage, honor, compassion, pity.  Not for you?

We do not practice those to be good

but practicing them has allowed us not to pass away as with the Mastodon despite our fragility. 

One is honest, not to be good, but that is how we get along with one another, to know where we stand in regards to those around us. 

Without compassion, the weak would not endure to grow strong enough to stand on their own.

Love like truth is beyond reason.

You don’t love because, you love despite;

not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

 

To get anywhere along your Silk Road of writing you need a compass.  Here is the one I used:

Unless your characters are in trouble,

it is your novel that is in trouble.

And not just trouble alone.  The struggle to endure must rivet the reader. Why is a reader riveted?

Because he has grown to care about the protagonist due to some resonance that character strikes within the heart of the reader.

Not that the protagonist must be a saint, for who relates to perfection? 

Indeed, maybe the hero has no morality at all, only an integrity to stay true to what he believes to be facts of human behavior. 

But your hero will do what a man or woman will naturally do,

not what a man should do, but what he will do ... maybe what he can't help but do.

Labor to bring your page to life:

The aim of every writer is to arrest motion, which is life, by the artificial means of prose 

and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. 

As a writer, always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.

Try to be better than yourself.

I do not expect you to remember what I say here, only to perhaps be hit like a tuning fork by something that spoke directly to you.   

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects,

longer than knowing even wonders. 

If you take nothing else from this lesson of mine, take this:

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews,

the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.  

WHAT ALONE CAN MAKE GOOD WRITING

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I am William Faulkner. I am dead. Yet I did not die.

I, like so many who did not believe in an afterlife,

live here in the jazz club, Meilori’s.

Meilori’s:

the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the French Quarter’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon,

laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and imponderable, tall as clouds, solid as rock,

dominating all: protector of the weak, judge and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and hopes of the helpless.

Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose.

Except through Roland’s kindness.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained that by now we can almost bear it. Of course there are still problems of the spirit. Yet one question looms above all:

When will I be blown up?

By terrorist plot,

by Nature’s increasingly hostile hand,

or by the cruel strangulation of mishandled economics.

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

You must learn them again.

You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

And teaching yourself that,

forget it forever,

leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

You write not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

of victories without hope and,

worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

You write not of the heart but of the sex glands.

I remember that night in Meilori’s when McCord and I talked.

How words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly living goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.

That sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they have forgotten the words.

Forgotten the words by being too busy living them.

So write those words in your prose.

Write them so that others may prove their truth by living them,

And in so doing, forgetting them as they forget they are breathing.

{To read more from Faulkner, Twain, Hemingway, Hitchcock, even Bruce Lee on writing : http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328048229&sr=1-1 }

***