"One Conflict-Free Life Please. To Go."

The Storybook Cafe on Elm was all concrete, metal, and glass. There was a row of stools facing the window, lined with hipsters and their Macboooks, no doubt earning money through social media management and marketing.

The barista wore a red flannel shirt, a beard, and brown boots. How, I wondered, did this lumberjack end up in perpetually sunny, 70-degree Beachtown, California. I glanced at the menu.

"What can I get for you?"

I put the menu down. "I will have one conflict-free life. To go."

"That's not on the menu."

I frowned and glanced at the menu again. Then I winked at him casually.

"It is for me."

"It's not on the menu for anyone."

"That's not true. I know for a fact you just served it to Miss Knee-high Boots and Tunic over there." I gestured to a tall blonde, sipping from her cup dreamily, staring at her screen.

"What other customers ordered doesn't matter. And besides, that wasn't what she ordered. Because it's not on the menu."

"It should be. It would really help your sales."

"That's not exactly the point."

"You mean it's not your job to give the customer what they want?"

"We serve stories, Ma'm. Thus the name."

Hipsters. What bunch of smart-asses. I persisted: "But that's all I want. I don't want any of these other things: 8 ounces of sorrow with a joy rinse? Relationship conflict with a character boost? Who would want that? Sounds like you get a lot of what you don't want, for just a tiny bit of what you do want."

"I don't make the menu. I just serve it. If you need more time to decide, I will help the next guest while you consider." He gestured to the man behind me and I stepped aside, disgruntled.

I took a seat at a glass table.

All I wanted was to be happy and stress-free. I didn't see the problem. An old man sitting next to me wearing a scarf and dark-rimmed glasses interrupted my thoughts.

"Might I make a suggestion?"

I was suspicious, but eternally polite, as always - a trick I learned to reduce conflict on my own. "Certainly."

"If you want a conflict-free life, you can try next-door at Dissipation Brewery. But I must warn you, I spent a lot of time there in my younger days and the conflict-free life doesn't exist. It might last for awhile, but it always disappears. That's why I dreamed up this." He gestured to the cafe.

"How do you stay in business?" I asked bluntly.

"Because people only think they want a conflict-free life. What they really want is a meaningful life; they want strong character, quiet confidence, and trust in something beyond themselves. Even when they say they don't want those things, they do."

I sat there annoyed. I wished I could tell him to stop talking to me.

"The good stories always have conflict because without conflict, people would stay in stasis - forever at the beginning of their story, never changing, never growing, never reaching the promised land. Just stuck at the beginning of the story. What if Frodo had stayed in the Shire? What if Huck Finn had stayed with his father?"

"They would have avoided a lot of trouble?" I quipped.

He ignored me.

"What do you really want out of your story? I bet if you thought about it, you would discover that the conflict-free life is priced much higher than any human being can afford. That is why it is not on the menu. It costs your character, your empathy, your hopefulness, your dreams, the fulfilling of your needs, your spiritual life, your personal relationships, and cost upon cost until your life is bankrupt of worth." He stood and folded his paper, taking his cane as he did so.

"For dissipation, you can visit the place next door. To get your life started, stop protecting yourself. He who seeks to save his life will surely lose it."

I sat silently. I knew I should feel inspired. But I just felt nothing.

It may have been a few hours, or minutes, but when I looked up, the lumberjack stood in front of me with a frothy latte.

"The gentlemen you were speaking with earlier ordered this for you."

"What is it?" I looked at it suspiciously.

"He said not to tell you. But to say that it was good." Then he set it down and walked away.

"I don't care how well it's written, I only care if it's a good story."

These words were uttered by a man I spent an entire day with, but will likely never see again. Mr. Greenberg was a teacher at summer school and I was taking classes to get my teaching credential. He graciously allowed me to sit and observe in his classroom. I took away two things that day that have stuck with me: an interest in Doctor Who, and the quote mentioned above.

We were talking books during one of the breaks the kids get. Of course we were talking books. I was an English major on my way to becoming an English teacher. He was a writer and an English teacher. It was only natural that this discussion occupied our time. I don't know what prompted this comment from Mr. Greenberg. I think I was flexing my English-major muscles and made a negative comment about a new release that was getting lots of love from everyone.

So I was a little chastised when he said, "I don't care how well a book is written; I only care if it's a good story."

To this day I can't decide if I agree with him. I've read some books with an interesting story and awful prose, and some books with beautiful prose and a yawn-inducing plot. I prefer the books that have both an interesting story and beautiful prose. But I see what he was saying. Some books seem to be written for English majors - who else would willingly sit through Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49? If you haven't read that gem, I can't even summarize the story for you because nothing really happens. I'm not kidding. There is a girl who is crazy and believes she has uncovered a conspiracy. She runs around discovering or imagining or projecting proof of this conspiracy. At the end of the book, you don't know if the conspiracy is real or if she is imagining it because she is crazy. But the prose is excellent. Very artistic and whatnot.

When I'm honest with myself, I don't want to read books like The Crying of Lot 49. I want to read books like The Lord of the Rings, or The Blue Castle, or Harry Potter, or anything by Mark Twain. Because those are really great stories.

Incidentally, they are also well written.

Which brings me to the other half of the equation: Books that are written poorly, but are great stories.

I'm reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo right now. (No spoilers, please, because I did just start it.) This novel has been raved about by tons of people, even fellow English teachers. Sadly, the prose is meh. True, this is quite possibly due to the translation, not the author himself. But it detracts from my experience. However riveted I am by the characters and the plot, the prose is awkwardly blunt, choppy, and has excessive chunks of exposition. So far, I am intrigued and I think I can safely say that I will really like it. But somehow the story doesn't feel complete without good, solid prose, perhaps a well-selected metaphor or a bit of elegant description.

So, Mr. Greenberg, I think I disagree with you. Story is arguably more important than how the story is told. But I'd say story is more like 60%, prose 40%, not story 100%, prose nil.

What do you think?

TEDtalk: "Why a good book is like a secret door" by author Mac Barnett

The last few minutes of this talk inevitably put a smile on my face every time I listen to it. Watch it. Share it. Make your day better. I promise you won't regret it.

Stock Characters and Their Eternal Popularity

I have been pondering writing quite frequently lately, and have found myself returning again and again to the same question: how on earth does Dickens do it? He wrote stories about characters that have endured long past his lifetime, yet if you read his books he is culpable for one of the most horrific errors a writer could make: many of his characters are what we now call “stock characters.” 

You might not recognize the stock characters in Dickens at first read, primarily because you will inevitably be overwhelmed by the vast amount of narrative exposition which occurs (the other so-called error that Dickens could be accused of is a heavy authorial presence throughout all of his books, except maybe David Copperfield, which was written in first person and was an autobiography of sorts and therefore the authorial presence was part of the story anyway). The reason you wouldn’t recognize these stock characters at first is because they are so different now. Think about the last movie you saw. Did it have a slightly whiny side character that was the first to get killed off because he was wasting his time complaining instead of paying attention? If it was a comedy, did it have the slightly weird side kick that was really way funnier than his prince-charming of a best friend, but too funny-looking to get the girl? These are the travesties that our society calls "stock characters."

We don’t value stock characters; we are usually offended by them. Good authors don’t use them and good movies don’t have them. The AMC channel touts that “characters are welcome” on their channel, which is why they played a John Wayne marathon, possibly one of the greatest characters ever, the cranky old womanizing cowboy who always wins in the end…oh wait. I’m pretty sure that a very similar character is in every western ever made. Or written. 

Maybe the characters that we love are more common than we think they are. Harry Potter is a good guy who is fighting evil despite great personal loss in his life and he is certainly not the first to do so in a novel. Voldemort is the bad guy that chooses power and evil over love and goodness... wonderful characters, but hardly original once we peel back their layers.They may not necessarily be stock characters - which is quite a negative term - but they are definitely archetypal characters, and that is essentially a more positive take on the same idea.

Maybe it is impossible to write a new character at all. Maybe they have all been written already and all the writers in the world should either give up or just write sequels to other people's books.

Not surprisingly, things worked out so that after thinking about all of this, sometimes intently and sometimes just in the back of my mind like a running commentary, I stumbled upon a blog written by my friend. This blog was not about stock characters, it was about friends and meeting together and about great authors, but my friend quoted G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I am pasting the quote here, it is long, but worth the read:

“All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.
People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.
This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death.
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE.”

Maybe this is why stock characters will forever endure and forever be loved. Because repetition is not lifelessness, it is not a lack of creativity, it is an encore of creativity. It is the essence of life to repeat and repeat and repeat…after all, there is nothing new under the sun.


And so Dickens, I tip my hat to you in honor of your love for human nature, your love for the characters you wrote and the characters you played, and to the vast wisdom that you showed when you created story after story filled with young innocents, evil old villains, crotchety misers, and benevolent benefactors. One day, maybe I will have the honor of following in your footsteps and so may stretch the very laws of proper grammar and how many commas can be fit into one sentence in my supreme delight at contributing to the world’s vast collection of stock characters.

Saving the world through fiction

Welcome!
I am glad your internet travels have led you here to this humble blog. Perhaps your attention was arrested by the wildly catchy title of this blog post: "Saving the world through fiction." Perhaps you are thinking that is an absurd claim and you are about to navigate away from such silliness, but wait! If you give me a few minutes of your time, I will convince you that reading fiction is healthy, will improve your life and the lives of others around you, and might just SAVE THE WORLD.

I used to read for fun, when I was younger. My parents decided to make me a leper by giving away our television so I had nothing better to do with my time than read. It was one of the best decisions they ever made.

Reading transports you to a different world, similar to the way movies or TV shows do.  The difference, I believe, is that you learn to appreciate story when you read, whereas watching television without being an experienced reader is nothing more than vapid entertainment. Appreciating story means learning to empathize with a character, learning to put yourself in the setting of the book, learning to suspend disbelief and learning to imagine.

So when I was little, I read for fun. Then I went to college and I read for school. Then I took a break because I thought I didn't have time for reading and I hadn't yet realized how important it was. But one glorious day I picked up another book and by the time I had finished, I was wondering why I had ever stopped making time for reading. The difference between little me, reading for fun, and big me, reading as a grown up, was that I realized how powerful literature was. I wasn't reading for fun anymore - though it was fun - I was reading for other reasons. To escape. To understand. To imagine. To believe.


That is beautiful, you think, wiping away a tear, perhaps, at my touching commitment to literature, but it still doesn't explain how reading is healthy and can improve my life.

Well, alright. If you insist:
How can reading fiction be healthy?
It can be healthy because it taps into the emotions, offers consolation and joy, offers an outlet for stress, and helps you communicate with others about both the difficult and wonderful things in life. As Brian Viner points out in his article "Well Read," "words on a page can sometimes reach the parts the medical profession cannot." You can read that article here. It examines the non-profit initiative Get Into Reading (based in the UK) that is using literature as a form of group therapy for various troubled souls, including high-security psych ward patients.

How can reading fiction improve my life and the lives of others around me?
Reading teaches empathy. I have seen it in classrooms myself and heard many teachers talk about this phenomena. There was a recent study done that examined the connection between fiction and empathy, finally determining that reading fiction makes people more empathetic with others around them. Here is the link to another blog that also discusses this study. I don't think I need to state how much we could use more people who were more empathetic in the world.

There you have it. I'm sure you are smart enough to figure out that people who live healthier emotional lives and are more empathetic can make a very big difference in the world; it isn't too much of a stretch then (notice I said "too much") to believe that reading can, albeit indirectly, save the world.

Before I let you go, I must offer a disclaimer: I am not a doctor, I am not a therapist, and I am not trying to suggest that you read a book INSTEAD of seeking counseling if you feel that you need it. I am merely suggesting that fiction can improve your life and help you deal with reality. And I'm also suggesting that fiction makes the world a much better place to live in.

Now go get a book off the shelf, crack it open and feel the slide of the crisp pages between your fingers, contemplate the first page and the tantalizing hints that the title gives you about what might be contained in its pages. Then turn to chapter one...and start saving the world.