As a young man, tortured by much of what went on around me, I spent a lot of time alone, mulling things over.   I learned to play guitar, found my way around a piano keyboard, drew, wrote– all solitary, expressive things I did in any quiet spot I could find.  Outside of those hours, my life seemed to be, as Albert King sings in Born Under A Bad Sign, one big fight.  

I fought with my parents whose limitations as parents left them prone to frustration and anger rather than able to guide or advise me or my sister in any meaningful way.   I spent decades fighting with many of the inevitable assholes one encounters almost everywhere.  

There is no shortage of angry assholes to fight with, if that’s what you are trained to do.  In fact, you’ll never even need to seek them out.  Bullies and jackasses will be irresistibly drawn to you in a crowd, seeming to know you are set up to struggle against them.  Each one will passionately make the case that you are the asshole.  It would take me decades to get enough insight into the idiocy of fighting with raging fools to start becoming a consistently gentle person.

I recall that when I used to sit down to write in my younger years I was bursting to write everything down, impatient to tell it all each time, get to the bottom of our existence here all at once.  Not only is this an impossible wish, it is self-defeating.  

The ideal writing session results in setting out one thing as clearly as possible, providing exactly enough detail and nuance to make the reader feel and understand that thing. In deference to the reader one also prunes away digressions, no matter how interesting the particular darling might be, if they might distract or confuse the reader.  Setting out one thing clearly, to me, is a good day’s work.

I’m reminded of this after reading something a very talented young writer posted recently.   It takes four or five very compelling story lines, summarizing each one in abbreviated fashion, and jams them together into one piece to tell an ambitiously global tale.  Reminded me of my own long ago impulse to try to tell everything at once, get to the bottom of what our lives and the things we learn here mean, if anything.  

Reminded me a tiny bit of Clint Eastwood’s latest, American Sniper, which reduces the most compelling mysteries of the story to a short vignette and a single line title at the end, while spending the rest of the time showing the simple heroism of a likable, honorable, driven man valiantly fighting to save his brothers in an unquestioned, horrific, war.  We see him suddenly cured of PTSD, smiling and hugging wife and children goodbye, heading to his car.  In the next frame, on black, a title summarily informs us that he was killed by one of the vets he was helping.  What?  Now we’re at his funeral and the credits are rolling.  What? Really, Clint?

I was around when this brilliant girl began to show her prodigious talents.  If I was feeling a bit more outgoing at the moment I’d reach out and invite her for a plate of dumplings.  I’d offer to tell her the rest of the story, for whatever use she might make of my view.  I was there on the scene from before she was born, a more or less objective adult observer, over the years her remarkable life began telling itself as a story.  

I’d also advise her to wait and consider, before publishing the piece, if it wouldn’t be better written as four separate pieces, each one including all the information the reader needs to see each complex story as three dimensionally as possible.  And to discard interesting side stories that distract, even alarm, the reader, and remove focus from the larger story being told.

And I’d remind her to be sure to tell each story with the satisfying amount of shading and detail she always has in her best work.  I’d stress the importance of mercy to oneself when telling a story.  Being unfair to oneself does not always seem unfair, but it is.  Unfairness is as hard to see in writing as it is to experience in life.   I really ought to call her.