Some years before I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I dropped out of high school. Before I dropped out of high school I wrote a paper on Billy Budd which my teacher, a notorious hard-a**, read aloud to the class. This is not the moment that made me become an English professor or a writer. Because, you see, I had not read the book.

I report this with shame now (though let me be clear: I did write the paper, based on class discussions and lectures), but it makes a good frame for my blog about the presidential debate, which is recorded and waiting for me, but which I did not watch live.

The problem with not watching the debate live is that its “liveness” is the only exciting thing about it. Sure, the first time around we (that is to say, every single person who posts their status on my facebook page and I) hoped Obama would wipe up the stage with McCain’s Maverick underthings, but the Vice-presidential debate taught us that there is NO WAY TO LOSE one of these things, because unlike an election, there is no Supreme Court to decide . . .

Once it’s taken place, ideally with shots aplenty and your rowdy, like-minded friends around you, the luster wears off instantly. The pumpkins are pumpkins and you know when you press “play” that they are not going to turn into coaches. The other glass slipper has not dropped. It’s like watching the World Series on TIVO when your team has lost and you know it. (I think.)

So I turn to my sources and try to do a little analysis.

Here is what I gather: McCain uses the term “friends” as loosely as Facebook does. People feel nauseous, and while some are driving to undecided states, others are doing pagan dances and crossing fingers, toes and eyes. Yes, more than anything else, this election has brought prayer back into the lives of the largely godless lefties who litter my Facebook page.

Three First Lines:

1) “I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once.”

2) “People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade–a lady with a dog.”

3) “Before I met Tim–who, in spite of everything I’m about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years–my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother’s house that I had to be nice to him.”

These first lines don’t tell you everything. No journalistic “who, what, where, why and when.” Fiction doesn’t have to provide answers. Instead, it must stimulate questions, in the reader. We read fiction to raise our blood pressure . . . which in turn makes us more relaxed, much the way cardiovascular exercise raises our heart rate in order to make our hearts healthy. Okay, not sure the metaphoric equation works, but you get the idea. I hope.

It just strikes me as funny that there is a tension involved in reading–good reading–but there is nothing more relaxing than being caught in the grip of a great novel or story, unable to stop reading. It feels so active, this kind of reading, so involving, and yet there’s the ol’ body, lying in bed, the book propped on pillow or chest . . .

But that’s the middle. In the beginning, we’re more tentative. We pick up the book and know we might put it down again. We’re starting a relationship with this new story, and we don’t know if we like it, if we care what happens in it, if we’re going to go the distance.

We read, “I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once.” (Alice Munro, “Face,” The New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2008, p. 59.) What? Here’s a shocking claim. All we know about the person making the claim is that he (as will prove to be the case here) is “convinced.” Certain. And that his father, if he is right, only looked at him, in the sense of really seeing him, one time. That suggests conflict. Two characters not meeting each other’s needs, locked into a relationship of high need. It’s a brash statement that goes against basic expectations of the parent-child relationship.

Try writing a strong, shocking claim like this that turns a socially-given relationship on its head.

A lot can be suggested in one line: “People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade–a lady with a dog.” (Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (NASF), eds. Cassill and Bausch, p. 236.)

Gossip. “People were telling one another . . .” A whole social world is suggested here, and an importance is given to this newcomer’s arrival because rumors are circulating about her. She represents a change in the status quo. And, of course, this is the first line of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” so the title is echoed in the first line, and we know that this lady and her dog matter.

Try introducing a change in the status quo through gossip, and set it up with a title you can echo at the end of the first line.

3) “Before I met Tim–who, in spite of everything I’m about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years–my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother’s house that I had to be nice to him.”  (Donna Tartt, “Ambush,” from Tin House,in Best American Short Stories 2006, ed. Ann Patchett, series ed. Katrina Kenison.)

There are two levels of warning offered here. The mother’s overt warning to the narrator takes place in the action of the story. The second warning comes in the aside. It suggests that the events to come contradict the eventual friendship that does, we are told, develop. Both warnings alert us to conflict, and we love conflict (when we are reading).

So try working two warnings into an opening line–one in the action and one in the narration. One from a character and one from the narrator herself.

Each of these first lines introduces at least two characters in some sort of opposition. By creating your own examples, you will suggest whole stories to yourself.

You’ll notice I’ve suggested imitation. Artists go sit in museums and recreate the masters. Why shouldn’t we writers imitate technique? I’ve found it a great way to develop my writing muscles. Feel free to imitate not only the function but also the rhythms and structure of a sentence.

I remember a fight in graduate school. A bunch of people were up in arms about some avant-garde poets who simply rearranged the dictionary and called it art. I shrugged. In essence, we are all rearranging the dictionary–because words are what we have to work with. Plagiarism? NO! Respectful imitation? By all means . . .

One good reason to vote NO on Prop. 8 (which would take away the right that gay men and lesbians now have to marry in the state of California) is that it’s putting an enormous amount of pressure on some of us to get married before election day in November, in order that we might be “grandfathered in” even if the right to marry gets overturned. How crazy is that?

Another reason is that it’s always nice to be on the side of social justice, civil rights and history. It just looks better. Your grandchildren aren’t going to think twice about gay people getting married, but they will look askance at those who opposed their right to do so.

Let’s say that it is true–somehow, though I can’t for the life of me imagine how it would be true–that my marriage weakens other, heterosexual marriages. Maybe some woman sees my spouse in the park playing with the kids while I sit, at a nearby picnic table, typing on my computer. She says to herself, “It is not even Sunday afternoon, and that woman’s spouse is playing with the kids. That is so unfair. I want to take away her right to be married to that person. And if I can’t do that, I want to go home and pick a fight with my own spouse, who never goes to the park on a Wednesday (most likely because he’s busy earning more money than I could in the same job).” So begins the fighting, the acrimony . . . and soon it’s divorce time. All because of my little lesbian marriage. Okay. I can imagine it . . . sort of . . .

Let’s say that’s true. Even if it’s true that granting me my civil rights threatens your marriage . . . drum roll . . . that is not a good reason not to grant me those rights. Have you ever read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin? You can find it online . . http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

It’s a powerful piece of writing that imagines a utopian society based on the suffering of only one child. LeGuin’s narrator speculates about how hard it is for us to imagine happy people who are not childlike and naive. The narrator nearly negotiates with the reader as to how Omelas’ society would function: drugs, perhaps? Religion but no clergy; a sense of victory but no soldiers. Festivals are taking place, some Renaissance in feel, some more Summer of Love. (The story was published in 1974.)

Finally, as if to make one last effort to convince us of the existence of Omelas, the narrator tells us about the child, locked in what amounts to a janitor’s closet, ignored, enfeebled. Every once in a while, the door to the damp room opens and someone throws food in, while more people look on without speaking.

"If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of 
that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted,
that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done,
in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and
delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those 
are the terms." (quotes are drawn from the web site given)

LeGuin has a vivid description of the rage and disgust of the children of Omelas when they learn about the suffering child upon whom their happiness and the beauty of their society rest, and then about the way they digest their feelings, and “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and accept it.”

However, there is one more thing that the narrator has to describe. From time to time one of the adolescents, after seeing the child for the first or second time, or one of the adults of a sudden, will leave Omelas, and walk away alone.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot descibe it at all. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Rereading the story for the upteenth time (I’ve even taught it before), I feel as if I understand it better than ever. Perhaps it is because I have found myself accepting the “terrible justice of reality,” trading it for youthful idealism and constant frustration. Perhaps it is because I am attempting to use the story to make the argument to those who believe that marriage is a beautiful and perfect institution built for a man and a woman that they should walk away from their utopia if it necessarily rests on the unhappiness of my people, on the pain of my sons, on the limitations of my civil rights.

LeGuin suggests that the place where people refuse to build their joy on the suffering of even one other person is a place harder to imagine than that joyful utopia, but if you are willing to set out in that direction, you will find your footsteps sure.

Read about Prop. 8:

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=California_Proposition_8_(2008)

http://www.noonprop8.com/home

as well as countless “Christian” web sites and reports of out-of-state money pouring in to defeat Prop. 8.

I am part of a loose network of published women writers. Lately, we’ve been discussing whether to discuss politics, and if the answer is no, in general, is this election and this particular historical moment too important–should we make an exception?

In debating this point, the NEA has come up as one specific organization that will be handled very differently under McCain than under Obama. But so, too, has the nearly inevitable extinction of polar bears under global warming been raised as a consideration. Rightly so, if you ask me. I mean, we have to write about something, and if the whole world evaporates, that will dramatic for a while and then deadly boring, with an emphasis on deadly.

I myself have been thinking about politics, and what role they might play in the life of my blog. Can one extol the virtues of casting against type in one’s novels (making the plumber a thin, gay Dartmouth dropout, for example), without explaining that one ought not go out-of-bounds in one’s own life and cast the small-town mayor as Vice President or the anti-choice hunter as a feminist trophy? Can one be clear that in a novel, choices must be real–between two goods or two evils, between a clear A and a clear B, rather than A or not-A–and still find oneself tormented by the fact that what seems from here a choice between good and evil, the exact wrong kind of choice for a novel–is being played out nationally and internationally with great suspense? (More on choices in fiction in a future blog.)

Panic has driven much of the argument for getting together to support Obama, even if some of our fellow published women writers don’t agree with these politics. (For the record, no one has come forward to say that they do not agree, though some have remained quiet and some prefer to do their politicking somewhere different from where they do their writing conversations.)

But I woke up this morning thinking that for the first time since I was thirteen, I feel excited about this election–not just panicked. What happened when I was thirteen? Well, the Democrats nominated a woman to be vice-president. I grew up surrounded by rhetoric about change: self-help change (change yourself, your organizational system, your bad habits, your eating patterns, your karma, your own tires . . .), spare change, and the inevitability of change. For one thing, it was Berkeley. For another, it was the era of the Cold War (the first Cold War?), and we knew that the choice was change or die. (This is another choice that doesn’t quite fit with the equation about choices in novels, above, but which made for a lot of earnest marching and learning of Russian lullabies and the making of several terrifying movies.)

Hence, as a child, I thought change was inevitable, and that a number of specific changes having to do with justice and peace and equality were right there on the horizon of my young life. Twenty-five years later, I am not excited to find that another woman has been nominated for vice-president, but I am hopeful–if you will–that the next president might be someone brilliant and nuanced and concerned about some of the major things that concern me. That seems like a change. And I will be glad if this country breaks out of its bass-ackwardness and elects a man of color. Maybe in eight years, we can then elect his wife. And get over the idea that we have to choose between having a woman OR a person of color as a candidate.

Anyway, I guess this choice thing is actually the crux of the matter. We are all trying to convince each other that one choice is the good one and one is the evil. It’s like sports–how the game plays out and what it means depends on who you are rooting for. In novels, you try to get everyone rooting for the same team, and yet you still want to humanize everyone. (James Baldwin was brilliant at loving all his characters.) Maybe that’s one of the great pleasures of reading: the reader gets to be the sole consciousness. No one else is there saying, But I agree with Miss Havisham. I liked the old Scrooge. Jean Rhys did write from the point of view of the crazy wife in Jane Eyre’s Rochester’s attic, but that was a different novel (Wide Sargasso Sea).

When we read novels we are subtly, pleasurably manipulated; in politics, the manipulation can sometimes be as subtle, but it’s rarely as pleasurable. If politics is a “choose your own adventure” story, as it claims to be, what can we readers do? Campaign, make calls, donate money, call in to radio stations, drive to Nevada, throw fundraisers, forward ghastly little emails . . . I don’t think we can market another story where the “drill, baby, drill” folks win another round. We have to hope for something new.