In The Kitchen

Nephew Peter Gorman spent New Year’s night on Waterhole Branch. He was a quarter of the way into a year-long ten-thousand mile bicycle tour around the country, literally, around the country, as you can see here:http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/09/22/biking-trip-peter-gorman-10000-miles/
He was inspired to embark on the trip, he told Boston Magazine, after reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. So he quit his job, sold whatever he could, sublet his apartment, bought a bike, and set out southbound the end of September.

I was reminded that Updike always said his “target” audience, the reader he wrote for, was just one single young midwesterner. I’ve always kind of liked that. It seems to say that if one reader, just that one reader, got out of a book what you put in it as the writer creating it, that was a measure of success, maybe the only measure of success you really need, everyone else be damned.

We gave Peter whatever he would accept the next day when he resumed — a spare pair of gloves, to swap out when others got wet; a red bandana with which to apply chain oil, oranges, a bag of raisins and Cliff Bars, anything, and for reasons beyond contributing to the cause: I desperately wished I could go with him, or follow in his footsteps, which I can’t, because the legs don’t want to cooperate these days. Instead, I gave him whatever old bike paraphernalia I had hanging around in a transparently vicarious gesture to be some part of his adventure. And I told Suzanne to keep my credit cards away from me lest I go trolling for a recumbent tour bike.

In the meantime, I’ll just read from a couple good new books, a Sam Larkin novel from Carl T. Smith called  Carolina Fire, and Bryan Stevenson’s expose Just Mercy, spin some miles on the stationary bike, and hopefully write something worth keeping. See you on the other side.

Another of my literary heroes was Kurt Vonnegut. His Slaughterhouse Five is another of those books I go back to again and again. Don and I read and talked a lot about Vonnegut, because he was so damn funny, one – and Lord, Don loved to laugh: didn’t matter if it was induced by something printed on the page or chemically, he loved to laugh – and Kurt was smart, and he got away with things no one else would even try. I mean, those drawings? And that narrative voice, which is always and immediately recognizable? You know you’re reading Vonnegut. It’s like watching Tom Cruise act: You always know who the player is, never get lost in the character, the story. Except Vonnegut got away with it. And he regularly broke the one inviolate rule of science fiction writing: you only get one deus ex machina per story, or book, only one miraculous intervention to save the day, or your authorial ass. That’s why Don’s, and mine, and later Tom Franklin’s – someone who would have really liked Don Eric Davis – science fiction was so bad. We couldn’t do Vonnegut. It was bad because we couldn’t get away with more than one deus ex machina and pretty much always needed more than one. Worked out fine for Tommy, as you know, certainly should know.
Worked out in a different, but very important way for me, too. See, a deus ex machina is only really necessary when a writer has written themself into a corner, and has no other way out, plot wise, but for some otherwise inexplicable appearance, occurrence, or Murder She Wrote detail that no one saw coming, or even entirely believes afterwards. You shouldn’t need that, of course, shouldn’t run the risk of your reader asking, “Is that really possible?” (Another of the ways to commit that sin of inviting the reader to stop reading: it’s a paradoxical example of art’s inability to imitate life. We’ve all had instances where we were certain there had to be a “god in the machine” to account for some fantastic occurrence, haven’t we? We might call it dumb luck, divine providence, or fate, but they’re all the same. And they’re all pretty much, “You had to be there, see it, to believe it,” too.) You’re allowed one, in science fiction, they say, but you shouldn’t need one, unless you’re Vonnegut. And there’s a way to avoid that dependency, I think.
Trust. If you can reach a level of trust in your story or your characters, they won’t lead you into those corners. Sounds vague, I know, but stick with me. Trust, versus faith, is most easily achieved through familiarity. In the task of writing that means knowing what your story is about – whether through cue cards or story-boards (I use what I call a map) – and/or knowing your characters well enough that they’ll actually take on a life and start acting on their own. I swear it really happens. It’s one of the most delightful moments in writing, when that happens. (Cartoonist J.D. Crowe in his new book, Half-Thunk Thoughts, calls it being in the zone.)
I can illustrate what I mean by that, I think. When I was first working on Jackie Robinson, first interviewing those old ballplayers, many of them were more than a little reticent in the face of a tape recorder or a steno pad. They had absolutely no experience with that formal a process. (You should have seen them when the book came out and people asked for their autographs!) But they had great stories. I just had to figure out a way to get them. Then I read the old sports writer Red Barber’s autobiography. In it he talked about encountering the same sort of difficulty early in his career, until he learned an interviewing technique from an even older sports writer, Red Granger. He said you don’t have to record what’s being said, don’t have to put any kind of artificial obstacle between you and your subject. You don’t want to, in fact. You’ll get a better, more genuine interview if you don’t. Instead, he said, pay attention to your subject, their mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, phrasing, rhythm, tone, emphasis, ticks, pauses, gestures, everything, and then after the interview is over, you recreate the character of the subject and the words will just fall out onto the page. Yeah, I didn’t believe it at first either, but it really and truly worked. Took some sweat to let go of that doubt, but it worked. That’s what happened, I think, when Twilight turned into a novel versus the nonfiction book it started out as. The story wanted to go in a different direction and little Willie Dixon showed up on the porch roof of his Michigan Avenue home. And it served me ever so well when Suzanne Hudson and I were working on Murder Creek a decade later. And I think it has served me well with other fictional characters since.
And then Suzanne led me to an understanding of why it worked, even if she had no idea that’s what she was doing. (Like most everything about her, “understanding”, with Suzanne, has to be processed through a different prism, though it’s so worth the effort.) Out of the blue (which might be as good description for that prism as there is) one day she said, “There’s an article in the latest New Yorker you must read.” So I did. It was called “The Possibilian” (I think you can still find it on-line, April, 2011, as I recall), about this crazy genius neuroscientist David Eagleman. I went from the article to his books, and one of them, Incognito, talks about how we only realize and use less than ten percent of what our brains are capable of, on a conscious level, at least. Below that level, though, there are reams and reams of programming operating in the background, taking care of functionality we are mostly oblivious to. In the book he gives example after example. It’s a really fun read. The point is, if you think of your brain as a muscle, with almost limitless functionality, you can exercise some of that potential. To me, that’s the same thing Red Granger was illustrating for Red Barber a century ago. And what I vaguely called “trusting” your characters and story has a scientific explanation.
And that, Hudson, the article, the book, Vonnegut (he was a final judge for an international short story contest Suzanne won forty years ago) is maybe the only deus ex machina I’ll ever need. She calls it “flocking”. I’ll explain, soon as I find the necessary prism.

That was the rallying cry of outraged librarians during World War II when it became known the Nazis had banned or burned millions upon millions of books. They organized book fairs to collect donated books to send to the GIs fighting on the continent, “arming” their minds with better ideas. Maybe you heard the story on NPR last week. Not too many of the books were what you’d call scintillating, though – Emily Post’s Etiquette, “Popular Mechanics”, or One Man’s Meat – however good the idea was. The War Department and publishers got together and started producing smaller, cheaper copies of popular titles and classics. “Armed Forces Books.” They were designed to fit in the pocket of fatigues or the fold of a rucksack, using a paper grade about the same as newsprint. The corporate bean counters estimated a single copy would last maybe six readings, that is six possession changes, before falling apart, given the conditions. There are stories of soldiers reading in the landing craft on the way to Normandy, books being smuggled into POW camps, books on the prep lists for airborne and naval maneuvers and books provided to liberated citizens of Europe. A fascinating new book came out earlier in the month, When Books Went to War, by Molly Guptill Manning. She reports that the program revived Gatsby. And one other especially interesting tidbit she uncovers is that she gathered evidence that there were books that lasted far more than six exchanges. One book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), by Betty Smith, had a waiting list at one point of over thirty names! Manning postulated that the book was so popular because it reminded the GIs of home, even non-New Yorkers. At least that’s what they said in numerous letters they wrote to the author. I like knowing that one fact right there. I was so pleased I went to amazon.com to see if Tree was still in print, still available. It is!
I’ve always had a hunch that books could be so much more than entertainment. They could be downright therapeutic. One of the last books I read in Japan was Irving’s Garp after it came out in the middle 70s. On nothing more than that hunch I mailed the book back stateside to older brother Jeffrey who was recovering from a pretty nasty leg fracture. Jeffrey’s always been a rabid reader. I remember whenever any books or magazines were out of place, or missing – of any subject matter – the first place to check was under Jeffrey’s bed. The next time I saw him – had to be a couple of years – he told me Garp was the best recuperative book he’d ever read. Granted, Jeffrey’s a certain brand of crazy: the broken femur was the result of his blocking the plate during a pick-up softball game. No one had to wonder whether Jeffrey held onto the ball after the nauseating snap of his leg. But I think he’s a beautiful kind of crazy. He doesn’t talk a whole lot, or very loud. When he does though, I’ve learned, it’s either very, very funny, or it’s a declaration loaded with conviction and consideration. I’ve probably given away a couple dozen copies of Garp since, and plan to again next week, and even reread it myself it from time to time.
Among the things I’ve picked up from reading interviews with Irving over the years – especially in that great old series, “Writers at Work,” Paris Review used to run annually, but are likewise still available – is that, he says, every book starts out with a proposition, “What if?” I’ve always thought exquisitely simple and succinct – particularly after experiencing how damned difficult it is to answer, “What’s the book about?” or write a decent description in the two or three sentences you get on the back cover. Waffle House, again, because it was all mine (comparatively) started that way. What if there was a kid whose life was almost entirely determined by tragedy?
The other thing Irving said was that he almost always writes the ending first. I haven’t had much success emulating that one (though I do think about the ending sooner in the process). It mostly mystifies me (or annoys, if I’m really pissed at John). How can you write the ending first? Doesn’t that change in the process from beginning to end? (Happens a lot to me, at least: something else we can talk about.) I certainly didn’t know the ending of Waffle House before starting. I did know the end of the story, though, the end of Jimmy Ryan’s story. In a story about a character’s life marked by comprehensive and continuous tragedy, in a book necessarily with a pretty high body count, there was no way I could sneak up on the subject of death. So I though Jimmy’s burial a right and proper place to start.
Or, if you don’t like that answer, it was at least a fun thing to do. Sometimes writing can be so frustrating, you have to figure out some way, any way to have some fun. I could concoct imaginary Q&A sessions, where, when the question inevitably comes – though there is another question I just knew would come up, but hasn’t – I can answer, “I thought I’d break some rules with this one, from the beginning; thought it’d be fun to bury my lead character.”

I try to put at least a little effort into the writing every day, if not actual copy then reviewing, editing, considering or noting whatever the current project might be. I call it trying to maintain some kind of continuity, when I have to call it anything. It’s the answer I give whenever the question of “writing process” comes up at a conference, a panel discussion, whatever. Like most everything else to writing there’s no single definitive way to do anything. I’ve just found that if I do something, anything, each day, seems to be surest way I have of insuring continuity in the reading experience – which is more than a little critical, I think. I might even go so far as to say that the reading experience is so deeply related to the writing process that any deviation in the latter directly effects the former. At least that’s what I take from its mathematical corollary, “continuous function,” which is where even a small change in the independent variable produces an in kind change in the function. Who knew?
Anyway, there have been a couple of significant interruptions to that continuity lately. One joyous, Joseph’s wedding, as you recall. The other not so much: we buried dad a few weeks ago. His sudden death and the necessary return to Syracuse have left me feeling like I’m barely treading water since (or maybe I’m just thawing out from days spent in a place where people actually say things like, “Tomorrow’s going to be much nicer. It’s going to get all the way up to 35 degrees,” and actually mean it). As suspected, writing, even talking about writing is my most certain lifeline, a lifeline that goes all the way back to Fuchu, Japan, and Don Eric Davis.
That’s what we did, mostly, just talk about writing, not in any direct way, that I recall, just in general. We talked about the mystery that some books moved you in a palpable way and stuck with you long after closing the back cover, while others dissipated almost immediately, like morning fog that’s there one moment, gone the next. We talked about how preposterous it was to suppose that one day either of us would actually put some words on a page that someone else would want to read. Sure, we entertained all the usual fantasies, about movie productions, awards, fame, fortune, immortality, discovering, in the end, it’s all about the work of writing, the nuts and bolts of putting words together. It’s about the continuous labor of love/hate that writing is. In fact, I’ve grown fond of answering that standard question of most any Q&A session, “Did you always want to be a writer?” with some version of, “No. No one who values their sanity or stability should want that.” Or even more to the point, “I actually believe that if you could quit writing, you probably should. You’ll be happier.” But if, like me, you can’t quit, what then?
Let’s talk about that. How do you begin a story or a book? As earlier, clearly, there’s no single definitive answer to that, which is why it’s worth talking about. Consider these two things: far and away the most common suggestion I make whenever someone asks me to look at a manuscript is that the beginning doesn’t seem right. And – maybe the most important writing tool I’ve picked up over the years – when something doesn’t feel right, the very least you can say about it, maybe the only thing you can say, is it’s wrong. It’s got to be fixed, or it’s got to go. See, I think most everyone has a pretty good sense for when something’s not quite right, in their writing, or life in general, for that matter. Whether it’s a single sentence, a bit of dialogue, double-parking the car or vacuuming the carpet, you know, you hear that little voice whispering, “Come on, you can do better than that.” Problem is, while you can take another pass with the Ford or flick the Bissell back to life, you don’t often have that luxury with writing. You don’t often know exactly what’s not right, which makes it pretty difficult to come up with what might be more right. All you know with any certainty is that it’s not right, and almost always the only thing you can derive from that is it’s wrong. Fix it, or cut it; neither is particularly simple or painless. But worth talking about.
Those beginnings that didn’t seem right? In no instance was the suggestion: “Start earlier, give me some more introductory comments or preface the story further.” Not one. In every single case it was what journalists call “burying the lead.” I think of it as sneaking up on the story, quite possibly because of the absurdity of the proposition Don and I talked about. That’s where it helps to know the “continuous function”: if you’re sneaking up on the story, you’re making the reader sneak up on it, and that’s probably not going to work with any readers beside spouses or mothers. While I might not believe there are such things as rules to writing – don’t think you can “teach” writing, like you can mathematics, for instance – there is definitely a cardinal sin to writing: try as best you can not to give the reader an excuse to stop reading. Sneaking up on the beginning is one of many, many, many ways of committing that sin.
Where, exactly then, is the buried lead? Let’s talk about that, or any other aspect of the work. Post a question, or if you prefer a more direct exchange, send me an email, joeformichella.author@riversedgemedia.com
I’ll even go first, if you like. One reader, one of the most important readers, actually, told me he initially questioned the wisdom of opening Waffle House with a funeral. Made me think about it, plenty, so I’ve got an answer, again, if you like.

So, after a less-than-stellar high school career including a new record for days tardy, obligatory football concussions, a broken nose courtesy of the tennis coach/English teacher and no actual diploma at the end of the walk across the War Memorial Center stage downtown, my options were severely limited. Not so my goal: get out of Syracuse. I joined the Air Force, even though the war was still loitering.

Two years into that hitch, after I’d bought all the new stereo equipment, the little red sports car, and played more pinochle than might be healthy, I started paying attention. I noticed Don Davis off in a corner of our underground bunker at Fuchu Air Station – a former kamikaze training ground, an early indication that Destiny’s got one wicked sense of humor – during the slow hours of our eaves-dropping on the North Koreans lest they got stupid while our attention was turned toward Vietnam (Shh: I think that’s Top Secret!), reading. Reading, and taking notes.

So I asked, “What’s up with that?”

“I’m going to be a writer,” he answered, gleefully, almost demonically, something I could well appreciate.

“Show me.”

He gave me a copy of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, an act, I later realized – it being the mid-70s – that was something of a test. No matter. Christ, what a beautiful book. Twenty years and half a world away from Syracuse and I finally realized what words could do. Though I resisted mightily for another couple of decades, I became a writer in that moment. Don and I wrote and shared some really bad science fiction stories, as all young, aspiring male writers must. And just as inevitable, the Air Force split us up.

I saw Don one more time after we left Japan – visited his and wife Marty’s home in West Virginia years and years ago – but have never forgotten him, and I still have that copy of Baldwin’s book. I have actually aged quite a bit better than it has, if you can believe that, but I’ve still got it.

And then, forty years after the fact, in the Acknowledgements of my first book, my first novel, I thanked Don E. Davis, despite not having any idea of where he was or what he was doing. It’s one of the things I think writing can do, show people you’re thinking about them.

Last weekend, at son Joseph’s wedding in Warrenton, Virginia, six of the eight Formichella siblings were together in one place for the first time in a dozen years. Here’s proof:

That’s Amy, Jim, Gail, Steve, and me. Lisa (not pictured), nearest in age – fourteen months and fourteen days separate us – my partner in crime growing up, the other black sheep of the family, pulled me aside at one point, said, “I read Waffle House.” Said she noticed the age difference between Jimmy and Frankie, the broken bones, the handlebar bicycle riding, all clues harkening back to our tortured childhood. She noticed them, and seemed pleased.

So even though I’m a less-than-stellar brother, cousin, son, uncle, friend, father, who can’t be counted on to send the birthday cards or make the periodic phone calls, I will acknowledge you somehow in the writing, my puny way of saying you’ve played an important part in this unlikely journey. I just hope you’ll notice.

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First off, let me admit that as a lapsed Catholic, I’m far more familiar with guilt than blame. But the circumstances surrounding my lapsing — that I was invited to lapse, versus merely allowing it to happen (a behavior which accounts for most of my other collected venal sins) — grants me a certain license, I think. That license says I get to blame someone, because you gotta blame somebody. And I blame Mick Jagger. I don’t blame him alone, of course. I know for a fact I share plenty — all right, most — of the blame, but you can’t start there. No place to go from there but down. So, at least initially — in the beginning, maybe the most terrifying place for anyone trying to write something, trying to tell a story — you gotta blame somebody, to figure it all out, to ferret out the story. So I blame Mick. If not for him and his buds and a certain record they made, there’s a real good chance I never would have wound up working in a hospital — and mostly disliking that work — for thirty-something years.

Petty, I know, but thirty-something years is still most of my life, at this point, most of the story. So I blame Mick Jagger. It was my first formal job interview, way back at the start of this tale. I’d landed, been fired from, exchanged a handful of other jobs before graduating high school in Syracuse, New York. They were all casual, friend-of-a-friend, support the habits kind of jobs. This was a job I’d chosen, pursued, applied for and scheduled to interview about, at the Onondaga County Community Hospital, for reasons I do not now remember but were viewed at the time as perhaps the most ambitious and responsible behavior I’d exhibited to that point, so that felt pretty good, at least different. But I wasn’t responsible or ambitious. I was still stupid.

I took a friend to the interview. I took Joey Early, a neighborhood friend. It would be years before I learned the trope with which to categorize the karmic oddity that Joey was hardly ever early. I didn’t much care about that then. Joey’s redeeming virtue at the time was that he was almost always holding.

We pulled into the parking lot of OCCH within what I presumed to be a window of acceptability, but there was a song on the radio that we both liked, a lot, even if we weren’t under the influence. So we sat, and listened, even sang along with Mick and the boys all the way to the final strains of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

I’d never before appreciated how long that song goes on though. At twelve minutes, we were well outside the appointment window. The Human Resources professional didn’t offer me anything but advice that fine early 70s afternoon in Syracuse. Show up on time. And don’t bring a posse. No job was forthcoming. So I went back to pumping gas. But I didn’t get a chance to find out something that would have been very useful to know a decade later when I was a little less stupid: how much I’d dislike working in a hospital. And that’s why I blame Mick Jagger.

It might have been tragic, discovering that I hated working in a hospital within six months of landing my first full-time post-military job in one. Tragic, that is, that it was such a revelation, that I had no clue how awful it would be. I’d exhausted my GI Bill toward the education to get the job. I was twenty-six years old, a thousand miles away from any family, and without any plan B, to speak of, truly, the stuff of tragedy. How could I have not known, you might ask. I blame Mick Jagger for that.

As it was, I had to learn how to cope, and wait for an alternate opportunity to present itself. Fortunately, I have something of knack for scheming. (My mother always called it “lying”, but that’s another story.) I did my time, working my way through the ranks, from night shift, to evening, eventually to a dayshift position in the transfusion service. And once I was part of the day shit, I got to go to the parties.

By parties, I mean pot-luck lunches where everyone brought their special something to the communal break room to celebrate birthdays or other holidays for those unfortunate enough to have been scheduled to work. I wanted to contribute, of course, wanted to get along in that purgatory, and could have easily settled on the usual suspects, the potato salad or deviled eggs or cocktail sausages, but that seemed rote, to me, churning along on automatic pilot. So I started signing the contribution lists taped to the door ever couple of weeks, “bread,” and then more specifically, once I got into a rhythm, “crescent rolls and honey butter.”

I didn’t think much of it, beyond a preference for fresh bread. I’d had a Scarlet O’Hara moment in the university A&P while I was matriculating where I vowed, “As God is my witness, I’ll never buy bread again!” It’s something of a long story, but I started baking all my own bread. I have to say that the one take-away from a bachelor’s degree in Medical Technology was that I could cookbook anything.

The ladies in the lab (did I mention that the career field is overwhelmingly populated by women, something else I might should’ve known, but didn’t), however, were aghast. “You baked those?” Yes. “By yourself?” Well, King Arthur helped. They started asking for crescent rolls for non-party occasions. Fine. And then, someone asked how much it would cost to get a whole batch, or two, or enough for their daughters wedding reception. Ergo, my scheme.

Word spread through the hospital, beyond the lab. Nurses would come down to the transfusion service to check out blood and ask, “Are you the baker?” Yes. “Can I buy some of your bread?” Depends…

See, I pretty quickly started billing myself as a “bread consultant,” versus just a “baker.” I wanted to distinguish myself from my other desperate scheming colleagues who crafted monogram Christmas ornaments or knitted doilies in the school colors of either Auburn or Alabama intending to likewise escape the hospital. But I also meant it. You shouldn’t just buy bread. You should receive bread customized for whatever the particular occasion might be.

“What kind of bread do you want?”

“Any kind.”

“What are you going to use it for?”

“I don’t know, a back yard barbecue, hotdogs, hamburgers.”

“Got just the thing.” I was making pretzel hotdog rolls a generation before Sonic. And I had a honey-onion-whole wheat hamburger roll recipe that was perfect (and as of today not yet stolen by Wendy’s, though they have started using brioche rolls, mistakenly; brioche doesn’t go with hamburgers; brioche, everybody knows, makes perfect French toast.)

I developed something of a reputation, one of a few, to be honest. And I figured that if I could bake and sell thirty-three parcels of bread a day – a dozen crescent rolls, a loaf of brioche or rye – I could quit my job. Eureka.

I had no shortage of customers, as word continued to spread that there was more than blood to be garnered at the transfusion service counter, and no shortage of ideas or suggestions, from cinnamon-raisin bread to cherry torts to pineapple coffee cake, sourdough English muffins or bagels, to honest-to-God authentic croissants and baguettes, which are so labor intensive I charged double for them.

The shortage lay in time to sleep. Once I got up to about fifteen batches a day, there wasn’t any. I had to make a choice. Either give up sleep or ditch the scheme. Believe it or not, I pondered those options far more than any truly rational person might. I mean, I ran the numbers: at fifteen, I was almost halfway home, and maybe I could cut back on my hours; I could move closer to the hospital and nap and/or work while the bread was rising. I won’t say that desperation is the mother of invention. It is something closer related to absurd ideas that would never otherwise be considered.

And then it hit me: capitalize on the absurdity instead of trying to monetize the baking. Of course. I could write about the scheme, get back to my so-called writing – which was also being neglected. So I did, I wrote “33 Loaves,” my first post-bad-science-fiction foray. The denouement is when the protagonist’s oven blows up in his face because he’d been too tired to regulate how much cognac he pours into a recipe he calls “cherries jubilee after dinner torts,” which is what actually happens to some of my ideas, maybe most of my ideas. (Don’t worry Mom, it’s only fiction. But who knew people paid for lies!)

That was over thirty years ago. My fifth book will be out soon – despite however many Brokeback moments I’ve had in the interim, “Why can’t I quit you?!” – and it still feels like a happy accident, something, I’ve decided is the only gauge against to measure avocation. I still bake, too, mostly for personal use, though fresh bread makes great Christmas gifts. And I’m still open to requests, of course, so if anyone is in need of a bread consultant, let me know. But I still blame Mick Jagger.