The Vertical as More Than Emotion

And House Call #17

What You See Above

Is a small glass sphere cast with a hologram or a cavity in the shape of a skull inside it. Years back I asked people to hide these in the woods and fields on my property, with the idea of strangers finding them in some distant future. The glass makes them impervious to snow and rain, and they can sink into moss or mud and stay hidden forever.

The joy for me comes from the idea of what strangers will make of each sphere when they find it. What story will they invent to explain it? What powers will they attribute to it? Someday each sphere will surface in the roots around a tree, or at the burrow of a mole, and the person who finds it will wonder over it.

To date when we’ve discussed “vertical” in a story we’ve focused on emotion — the emotional build that accompanies the horizontal plot. But sometimes the vertical is a deeper meaning the reader is meant to discover much later. As a child I enjoyed The Martian Chronicles, but as an adult I appreciate how the stories about the conquest of Mars are actually stories about the conquest of the Americas, and about the subsequent messy imperialism that followed. It’s a very grown-up political book in the guise of pulp sci-fi. Likewise, I enjoyed Fran Lebowitz’s essay Notes on Trick, but I adore it now that I see it was lampooning Susan Sontag’s landmark essay Notes on Camp. The backstory or hidden meaning explodes like time-delayed ecstasy, and sometimes that’s the vertical. Especially for you, the writer.

Here I’ll summon the Ghost of Tom Spanbauer… For people new to his workshop, Tom would ask them to write about something they could barely recall. Each writer might begin with a single detail: a taste, a color… but once it was written down, that detail prompted a new, heretofore forgotten detail. Within a week, the writer had usually unearthed an entire memory that had once seemed lost forever. Thus in Tom’s program of “Dangerous Writing” we weren’t told to spill out some known pain, as in intentional memoir writing. Tom coached us to begin with one small something we found enticing — but didn’t know why we found it so enticing.

Case in point, forty years ago I began to write a story called Trained Birds Change Your Oil, about a Jiffy Lube-type business where normally flying, singing, bright-plummaged birds were instead slaving away to do car maintenance. The story spun round and round in my head for a week or more, until I hit on the line “All summer I wanted someone to ask me what happened to my face. ‘Birds,’ I wanted to tell them, ‘Birds ate my face.’” A classic Gordon Lish “Line of Flight” sentence, it turned into the book Invisible Monsters.

Still, I’d no idea what the story meant. It was a lark — no pun intended — and it was fun enough to keep me exploring it until I had a book. Not until a decade later, once the book was published and I was touring to promote it, did I realize the horrible truth I’d put down on paper by accident.¹

You see, Tom’s trick: Write about the glittering something that entices you… leads you past you own self defenses, and allows you to unpack a truth you’d never in your rational mind touch. For years I wrote to Ira Levin, asking, “Is your book Rosemary’s Baby actually about the German drug Thalidomide, and how thousands of young mothers blindly trusted the medical establishment and swallowed Thalidomide and unfortunately gave birth to infants with limb defects — defects, frankly, very much like the clawed hands and feet of the “devil’s child” birthed by Rosemary Woodhouse?”

Of course Levin said I was full of shit. He’d delivered his social comment, his Martian Chronicles, and gotten it under the radar. Readers reacted in horror, but never realized why they’d been so unnerved by a melodramatic story about would-be Satan worshipers. The “vertical” was never really on the page, it was in the culture.

That is the kind of Dangerous Writing that would make Tom Spanbauer proud. It’s not just about sneakily revealing the truth about one person — the writer. It’s about tricking an entire society into confronting a flaw so tragic that no one wants to look in that direction.

Which Brings Us To

This week’s House Call is The Wrong Cantina by Tony Mills. It’s a good story, with some flare-ups of excellent language; however, when I started to press Tony for more detail he responded, in effect, “It’s not that deep. It’s just pulp.”

I don’t buy that. I can accept that Ira Levin didn’t want to rewrite The Midwich Cuckoos, but something was baiting him in that direction, and eventually he unconsciously gave vent to the collective, unexpressed horror of Thalidomide. For Tony Mills to write this and post it… I don’t accept that the story is a bit of fluff fobbed off for no good reason.

If Tony will forgive me, and I’ve been mulling this over all week, the vertical is some angle on the story that the author has yet to recognize.

And how do we recognize such things? We return to them. We find the one germ of something that lures us onward. The story might not be about parrots doing lube jobs, but that’s something that will leads us to something that will lead us to something that will leads us to a huge, unexpressed, to-date unseen truth. A truth possibly about everyone.

For now, please consider that what you write is never just “pulp” unless you’re so spooked by it that you can’t explore it further. Please give The Wrong Cantina a read, and give Tony some decent feedback. But please be aware that nothing is ever really “pulp.” Even the most ludicrous ideas occur to us for a reason. Whether or not you pursue them is up to you.

Where some ideas go is a place you’ve been avoiding your entire life.

After all that, if you’ve got a writing sample and would risk a House Call, please post the link Here

And Thank You to Tony!

1. Don’t ask.