Jack Gould: Untitled [tug-of-war] (1955)

"Bruising sometimes occurs …"

Not every story wants to be told. Some seem adamant about remaining private. A few seem to employ extraordinary means to prevent their author from sharing them. On the other hand, a writer must sometimes insist, regardless of how vehemently a story might resist being tamed. The Belligerence, when opposing, sometimes seems overwhelming. While The Muse snoozes, I might be engaging in hostilities few should believe could happen. My office and desktop have seen countless wee-hour battles between my insistence and those stories' stubbornness, and I have not always won. Plenty of budding stories have lost their chance of becoming shared by merely holding their breath until they turned blue or just digging in their heels. Some of the best ones refused to be chronicled by me or anybody, and that's the honest truth.

As a lifelong pacifist, I cut a curious figure when I headed into battle with this Belligerence. I wear no patriotic colors. I appear no different than when I'm not playing soldier. I suppose the difference only shows inside, where even I might find it difficult to notice. This all works better when I can lean into rather than go all Onward Christian Soldier on the story. Like anybody, even a mediocre story should properly resist change. Everybody's Job One involves preserving the pre-existing, to prove Newton's First Law again, just as if it needed to be reproven. A story quite naturally resists being told unless it encounters some motivating force. This need not necessarily involve violence. Often, an insistent tug proves perfectly adequate to secure such shifts, but sometimes, a story will tug back as if to suggest that it doesn't appreciate the attention or the effort. This signals a potential for Beligerence.

On my better days, I'm likely just to let a resistant story have its way to stay untold. I deal in a perfect market with infinite supply and equally infinite demand. My writing well has no apparent bottom, so leaving a story untold does not leave the universe less well-served. The universe, as near as I've ever been able to tell, remains agnostically indifferent to whether any specific story stays mute or gets itself told. As a mere factor in production, I might be best served by mirroring the surrounding universe's indifference. If not that one, then another, and there's always another. That other one might even prove superior. Most of humankind's difficulties stem from jealousy, encountering the sense that someone unjustly possesses something nobody could ever actually own.

My internal dialogue might turn salty on those lesser mornings when I'm wrestling Beligerence into presence. Of course, the opponent is probably always just me in a different guise, but I'm not above losing even a fair fight with myself. The notion that even loving stories were not the product of, if not precisely, violence, a strong-armed insistence strikes this experienced writer as naive. Nobody wants to have to drag a writer off his own damned playing field, so I buck up and accept my responsibility as well as my fate. The resulting colorful internal language need never be disclosed. This terrible truth I share today was not something I'd usually say. I might admit to the occasionally good-natured wrestling match, but Belligerence amounts to qualitatively different. Bruising sometimes occurs both for the author and the story he finally tells.

This story wanted me to tell it. It exhibited almost no Belligerence, just a little initial resistance. I waited it out, for often an ounce of patience can out-perform more than a foot-ton of violent insistence. I experienced times when training for my profession when I mistook every story as unnecessarily resistant. This misattribution encouraged my own Belligerence, for, being human again, even this lifelong pacifist retains the capacity for unnecessary violence, especially when feeling needy or deprived. Out-growing this insistence served as an essential element in my training, for I would not have thrived as a writer had I needed to be continually Belligerent to survive. I do not inhabit a dog-eat-dog world but a dog-describes-dog one. I strongly prefer playing to tussling, though I'm never very resistant to a good-natured tug-of-war if it produces a decent story.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz