Writing: Uncovering A Surprising And Beautiful Buried Treasure — by Lazarus Barnhill

Decades ago when I was in my early teens, my father and I were driving through the mountains of southeastern Oklahoma — laden with switchbacks, dips and hairpin turns — when we saw a motorcycle come toward us and flash past in the opposite lane. It was ridden by a helmetless Native American whose face was totally expressionless. Sitting behind him, a young woman pressed herself against his back, her eyes closed — whether in ecstasy or fear I did not know. The bike was moving so rapidly I caught only a two or three second glimpse of them. Still the impression, as you can tell, remained with me for a lifetime. My dad was also seized by the vision. I could sense him reflecting on their appearance and disappearance and I heard him mutter, “What about that? An Indian on an Indian.”

That solitary image remained with me in the brooding recesses of my awareness for forty years until it became the central vision, the cathartic scene of a novel that built itself around that impassive visage of the man on the motorcycle. My second published novel, The Medicine People, began in my mind with an imagined picture of that Native American standing silently in a jail cell, his hands around the bars, waiting for a certain person to come and speak with him, knowing the dialogue between them would permanently alter both lives.

That’s my creative process; that’s how stories develop themselves for me: I experience something striking and the retained memory of it marinates and evolves in the depths of my mind. The stories grow, sometimes as with Medicine from the middle simultaneously toward the beginning and end, but sometimes from the end backwards or even, conventionally, from the start to the finish.

Once the basics of the story have germinated and I have a grip on where they are going, the real fun begins. With my first published novel, Lacey Took a Holiday, I was inspired by a Natalie Merchant song that described a cowboy professing love to a drunken saloon girl. She wakes the next morning to discover he has disappeared. From that image, Lacey the character and Lacey the story took root in my thoughts. By the time I started actually writing the book, I knew where the journey was going to take this saloon girl. The actual writing process had more in common with uncovering a surprising and beautiful buried treasure than figuring out how to put the “flesh” of details on the “skeleton” of preconceived story. From that single original image, the story develops and completes itself.

That’s the basis of my little literary world. Writing is exciting and strange — how odd to think that an entire story can coalesce and emerge from the flotsam from my lifetime of disorganized observations and faded memories. And, for me, perhaps the most exciting aspect of writing is the notebook I keep by my bed with the basic images—some with partial outlines and possible characters — for two dozen “treasure chests” I haven’t yet begun to open.  —- Laz Barnhill

The Top Ten Reasons We Need a Good Laugh by Lazarus Barnhill

A couple weeks ago I tried an experiment. For a solid week I turned off my computer at 11:30 and turned on the TV. I alternated daily between watching the monologue of Jay Leno and of David Letterman. My goal was to determine which of the two was the better comedian. I watched Leno Monday and Wednesday and Letterman Tuesday and Thursday. What did I decide? . . . Well, honestly, neither one of these guys is all that funny. On Friday I watched Leno’s monologue and then tuned in to Letterman’s famous “Top Ten” list. That made it official: you can combine the two and they still aren’t funny.

In my judgment (and I realize this is strictly my jaundiced opinion), these two guys are unfunny for different reasons. Leno constantly goes for the quick, easy, often dumb joke. His studio audience responds with regularly timed courtesy laughs, so much so I wonder how they’d respond if he said something really funny. Occasionally he does say something fairly clever, but his delivery is so popeyed and cute that it spoils the gag—like someone ruining a joke by laughing at his own punch line.

Letterman doesn’t really try to be funny so much as he coasts along trying to be hip. His entire presentation is a perpetual NYC insider joke: “I’m too fashionable to do anything but pretend to take this seriously; and if you’re hip, you’ll laugh at this pretense along with me.” The currency of Letterman’s humor is patronizing cuteness. His Top Ten list is an exercise in hipness, a big part of which is making certain nothing really funny ever gets listed.

So what? Well the reason I tried my little experiment was because I needed a good laugh. Ever been there? And what can be crueler than tuning into a TV comedian who gets millions of dollars a year because he’s supposed to be funny and not getting anything like a legit chuckle? I have this burning desire to express a thought to these two guys: you two are paid to make us laugh; we have no desire to listen to your pandering and coasting. Once upon a time, each of you knew how to be funny and you need to find that place again—and here are the top ten reasons we need a good laugh:

10. We need to remember we’re still alive. A good laugh is living proof of living. Among the prominent things dead folks don’t do is laugh.

9. We need to show God we can take a joke.

8. Laughter is free. And it’s free to laugh at people who are at different economic stations than we are. [True story: Year ago I went to an independent film at the ritziest theater in St. Louis. There I saw a well-to-do fellow come up to the kid running the concession stand and inform her that she had to hold his pager during the show so she could come get him if it went off. Funniest thing about it—the guy had utterly no idea why I was laughing.]

7. Laughter is a universal time machine, taking us individually back to our best or worst moments without cost, grief or regret.

6. A good laugh washes away our anxiety; that is, it yanks us out of what we regret (the past) and what we fear (the future) and brings us back to the present, if only for a moment. We see things more clearly after a good laugh, and make better decisions.

5. A good laugh is hard-wired into reality and truth. A spontaneous belly-laugh momentarily cuts through the sham and self-deceit of civilized living like a breath of cool, fresh air in a stuffy, moldy room.

4. A good laugh is spiritual, like a miracle: you never see it coming; it overwhelms you despite yourself; you can bask in it and be refreshed.

3. It’s a presidential election year. Presidential election cycles should be renamed: “the year of living seriously.” When did a political candidate say something funny that wasn’t a dig at somebody else?

2. We need to laugh down the walls between us. Being serious, earnest and worried about our differences hasn’t worked.

1. We all have at least ten things to cry about.

True story: On lucky April 13, 1988, my beloved red Nissan pickup was totaled in downtown Tulsa by a drunk driver who ran a red light and t-boned me. After making sure the other driver (and his drunken girl friend) were not seriously injured, I stood in the middle of the intersection looking at my crumpled vehicle. A tall, earnest fellow hustled out of the Dodge dealership on one corner of the intersection, informed me that he had called the police and said, “This may be a bad time to ask this, but are you in the market for a truck?” For a split second I was furious. And then I laughed, a nice big, curative laugh. I don’t need anymore car wrecks—but I could use a few more good laughs.

***

Lazarus Barnhill is the author of Lacey Took a Holiday and The Medicine People, available from Second Wind Publishing.

Everything That Converges Must Emerge (a play on Flannery O’Conner’s wonderful title Everything That Rises Must Converge)

[I’ve only had a few real passions in my life, and most of them date back to my childhood.  As a kid, I could always outrun all the other kids.  Through the ebb and flow of the years, the love of running has remained with me and expresses itself now in road racing; I hope to run my fourth marathon, the inaugural Charleston Marathon, in January.  Another, even greater, passion is writing.  These two passions have mirrored each other in many ways throughout my life, each teaching me lessons about the other.  At last they have come together in a novel I hope to have in print around the first of the year.  It’s called The Boston, and tells the story of the first American born runner to win the famous Boston Marathon in more than twenty-five years.  The scene below comes from the fourth chapter in which the main character, Ron Jerdin, is conversing with Lillian Smits, a young woman who is riding with him to a foot race.] 

            “So why do you really run?

            Ron settled back in his seat, staring over the steering wheel at the highway before him.  No one had ever asked him to talk about running before.  Reporters and admirers often asked about races and his experiences in them, but never about the purpose or the essence of what it meant to run.  And for all the years he had run so many miles, he wasn’t sure he could express what it meant to him.

            Beginning slowly, he said, “I run for every mile after the first mile.  When I run, the farther I go, the more I belong to myself.  I have . . . serenity.  When I run, the world stops being a place of excruciating pain.  And as long as I run, the world can’t hurt me. . . .  When I run, I become something that very few people can be and very few can understand.  It’s almost like having the ability to fly without leaving the ground. . . .  When I run it’s a time machine.  I put myself in this virtual capsule and I’m gone to the land of clarity and beauty.  An hour or two or more passes.  I come back and nothing has changed. . . .  When I was hurt and couldn’t run, running waited for me.  A day came—just a week or two before your sister went to the Olympics—when I finally made it back to running.  I could run as far as I wanted without any pain.  And I knew I was back and that running had waited for me.

           “The whole time Marianne was gone to the games, I brooded and sat around feeling angry at myself, feeling like a failure because of the injury and the surgery and the misery.  Only, I would go out and run in the morning and again in the evening and the feelings would leave me for a while.  Running got me through that time when there was no one else.”

           “. . . You make running sound like a woman.”

           “Ha.  No.  It’s more like . . . well, I heard about an American Indian runner once—maybe it was Billy Mills—who said that Indians run to draw strength from the earth.  I get that.  When I run, there comes a point where a connection opens between me and another place and goodness begins to flow in.”  He smiled.  “Was that philosophical enough?  I said way too much.”

          “What did you mean when you said you run for every mile after the first mile?”

          “Oh.  That’s something I learned from my cross country coach back in high school.  He said, ‘Remember, boys, nobody likes the first mile.  The first mile is the price you pay to get to the zone.’”

         “The zone?”

         “Yeah.  I used to think he was talking about ‘runner’s high,’ you know.  When your endorphins kick in after a run or a race and you’re buzzing.  I discovered, eventually, the zone is more than that.”  He glanced at her.  “Want some breakfast?”

– Laz Barnhill

 A voice calls, “Write, write!”
I say, “For whom shall I write.”
And the voice replies,
“For the dead whom thou didst love.”

—John Berryman

 

Lazarus Barnhill is the author of Lacey Took a Holiday and The Medicine People, available from Second Wind Publishing.

 

Chick Gross-Out Movies

                The most exciting day of the week for me as a child was Wednesday.  That was “dollar night” at the Riverside Drive-In of Norman, Oklahoma.  My mom would make a grocery bag of popcorn (cooked in bacon drippings and seasoned with coarse salt, by the way) and my parents, my sister and I would ride out to the show in our ’52 Chevy.  They let the whole carload in for a buck because the movies were not new releases.  They were classics.  Sitting in the back seat, I got to see some of the great movies of the mid 20^th century: Hitchcock thrillers like Rear Window and Vertigo, comedies, noir films, family movies (I was pretty much in love with Hayley Mills after The Parent Trap and Pollyanna), sci-fi, horror (I had to beg my folks to let me see those great Hammer Frankenstein flicks) and of course westerns like Shane, High Noon and Red River (one of the most traumatic experiences of my young life came when Gary Cooper was almost lynched at the end of The Hanging Tree).  I grew up loving movies and understanding the differences between film genres.

                Because I’ve been aware of movie genres and subgenres for fifty years now, I feel as if I’m on pretty firm ground when I say that a new subgenre has emerged, one I’m wrestling with and frankly a little irritated by.  We all know what “chick flicks” are (recent example: The Notebook) and we’re all familiar with “frat boy” movies that rely on disgusting adolescent topics for laughs (The Hangover for instance).  Over the last few years a new subgenre has emerged that combines these two.  I guess we could call them “chick-gross-out-movies” [these are not to be confused with “gross out” movies that have chicks in them, like Saw].  These are movies clearly intended to be viewed primarily by women, but they have a strong element of disgusting behavior or dialogue that disqualifies them from being true chick-flicks.  They are really less chick-flick than romantic comedy, but the “not for mixed company” conversations and events disqualify them from that genre as well; plus there always seems to be a girl-and-guy-finally-get-it-right-at-the-end theme.

                One of the prime examples of this was the 2007 movie Because I Said So, that begins with a middle-aged mother and two of her daughters having a cell phone conversation with a third daughter about the penis of the uncircumcised man with whom she is about to have sex.  I’m sorry I described that, but you probably understand the dynamic I’m talking about now.  The same sort of dynamic is at work in Something’s Got to Give (did we really need to see Jack Nicholson’s naked behind or Diane Keaton’s gratuitous frontally nudity?), Knocked Up and a number of other recent pictures.  Recently I got talked into seeing The Backup Plan, that begins with Jennifer Lopez in the stirrups having in vitro fertilization and goes downhill from there.

                I’m at a loss here.  This is an honest question: who really, fully enjoys movies like this?  We actually had a family discussion about this not long ago.  My older son offered the opinion that the disgusting elements in these movies were put there to give guys a reason to sit through them with their girlfriends.  Maybe so.  After all, if you look at the list of producers, directors and writers of these movies, they are mostly men; plus they are all “Hollywood” shows and therefore essentially created by cookie cutters.

               On the other hand, if you want to appeal to frat boys, you get fewer laughs with a baby-being-born-“I-shouldn’t-have-seen-that”-scene than a scene of someone getting drunk and throwing up.  Can it be that the young women of the world are striking a blow for equality, asserting that females can be just as disgusting as males—and enjoy it?  Of course, perhaps this is just a sign that a new plateau or threshold has been reached: maybe it has just become that much more difficult to be shocking and outrageous, and if the movie kind of sucks you need that to distract your viewers.

               Another possibility is that I’m just old, irrelevant and out of touch.  I have to be open to this possibility I suspect.   Heaven knows, there are a lot of intimate human events, but I don’t play them for laughs, or use them to make my readers gag.

              Going back to the Riverside Drive-In, one of the first things I learned from the master storyteller Alfred Hitchcock is that you don’t have to show skin to be incredibly sexy or show graphic wounds to convey violence (in Psycho you never see the knife actually strike its victims) or shock people to scare them (the suspense of waiting for something that might happen is much more compelling than having somebody leap out of the dark and make a loud noise).  So I’m just going to keep being old-fashioned and strive for quality in my writing, and know that some filmmaker somewhere has the same values I have.

Lazarus Barnhill is the author of Lacey Took a Holiday and The Medicine People, available from Second Wind Publishing.

The Best Thing About Being a Fiction Writer Is . . .

When the conference was over, Laz gathered the handouts and picked up his notebook and walked out of the assembly hall into the brilliant Carolina midday sun.  Everett emerged from the darkness at the same moment and the two old friends found themselves walking together.

“So what did you think of the conference, Laz?”

He shrugged.  “You first.”

Everett laughed.  “That pretty much answered my question.  I’m about the most idealistic person I know, but I have to tell you I got a little tired of the ‘high-and-mighty’ tone of the speakers.”

“All of them,” Laz agreed, nodding.

“I guess there’s something wrong with me,” Everett continued.  “They were saying all the right things and I know I was supposed to agree.  Intellectually I’m pretty much right with them.  Only . . . well, it’s hard to put into words.  Somehow all that righteous indignation put me off.”

“They were self-conscious,” Laz said.

 “Self-conscious?  How can you say that?  They did nothing but brag about themselves and drop names for the whole two days.”

“I mean they were self-conscious not in the ‘shy and embarrassed’ sense, but in the ‘I’m going to put myself in the limelight so you all will admire me’ sense.”

“Ah.  Yes, everything they said showed they were mostly conscious of themselves.  I think that’s it, Laz.  Despite the fact that I agreed with them almost completely in principle, their constant ingratiating attitude just sapped all my enthusiasm.  Listening to all those speakers pat themselves on the back, I got to where I thought this was a bragging contest.”

“You know what I kept thinking, Everett?”

“What?”

“I kept thinking, ‘This is why I’m a writer.  This is why I write fiction.’”

“. . . What do you mean?”

“Well, I feel just as strongly as all those speakers did—and pretty much in the same way.  And maybe I want to express some of my strong ideas.  Only, when a person gets up and makes a speech about a controversial issue, half the potential listeners have already tuned him or her out.  And two thirds of those who are on the same side as the speaker are only listening to hear things they agree with.

“On the other hand, when you write a story—if you do it right—you can draw in any reader.  You can express your ideas either in what your characters say or in what happens to your characters and how they respond.  As a writer you have the ability to show a realistic grasp of both sides of any controversial issue.  Most public speakers forget there are two sides to any issue because they’re so busy trying to prove their side is the valid, important one.

“When you write about a controversial issue, you don’t have to make it the center of your story to express it fully.  You just work it in.  For instance, when I wrote The Medicine People, I deal a lot with the quiet underlying bigotry Native Americans and Western European descendants still harbor for one another but never express out loud.  And while it was essential to the story, it didn’t overwhelm the novel.  Stories have the power to make an issue live in the mind of the reader the way a speech never can.

“And the best thing about being a fiction writer is, you don’t have to brag to get your point across.  The best writer is one whose reader gets absolutely lost in the narrative and—oops!  Watch out for the curb, Everett!  Are you okay?”

“Yeah.  Just clumsy.  What were you saying?”

“I don’t remember.  Let’s go get lunch.”

Lazarus Barnhill is the author of The Medicine People and Lacey Took a Holiday, both published by Second Wind Publishing Co.