Writing Secrets: Plot vs Story

First Published SF Novel: Pioneers

Just 25 light years from the dying Earth is a fresh, earth-like planet that beckons with radio transmissions. The six last surviving humans make a 1,000-year journey through space—to find a world riddled with mysteries, and answers to questions nobody had thought to ask…in the ghostly city of Avamish. Paul and Licia Menard struggle with the defunct customs of distant Earth as a beautiful blue princess and a mysterious shaman guide them in an often terrifying new world.

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Baffled in Germania When I was young, I served on active duty as a junior enlisted soldier with the U.S. Army in then-West Germany. I was, by my mid-20s, a struggling writer with a B.A. in English (University of Connecticut, Storrs) and one finished SF novel (Pioneers, 1974) making the rounds via a New York literary agent. I had about a dozen mostly SF short stories that had been rejected all over town (which means New York City). I couldn't stop writing, which would be my fate in life, and I was desperate to find out the reason for all those rejection slips (even those with personal notes of encouragement scribbled along the top by a harried but thoughtful editor). One part of the answer came to me in a way I'll describe here. Besides illustrating a secret about writing, this story also illustrates that I have made every mistake in the book (no pun intended), but I'm here to tell about it.

Ten Thousand Lightyears from Home In desperation, I bundled a dozen of my best short stories to send them to someplace in 'the world,' where I thought some kind soul might provide answers. Remember, I was 9,000 miles from home in California, and 6,000 miles from 'the world,' which began at the Statue of Liberty, who stands with her light aimed at her home in Europe, and her back toward events in Manhattan (including the print publishing industry, though she holds what is probably a self-published novel in her left hand, and a torch to burn it with in her right hand).

As a budding young SF author, the irony of 'the world' was not lost on me, since it seemed as if I were writing to Home Base Earth from a distant outpost on the purple slag heaps of alien Procyon VI. It was a great era of seemingly limitless catchy music by which to drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and write science fiction. AFN Holland and AFN Frankfurt throbbed with the latest from EarthWind&Fire or Donna Summer. You could visit stylish European discotheques (if they weren't illegally off limits to U.S. G.I.s) for driving dance music in an era of relative innocence. You could crank up your AFEES-bought, Japanese-made stereo sound system to pour forth inventive baroques from Chic Corea, Herbie Hancock, and more. Once in a while, the sun shone, but not often. Most of the time it drizzled, and you could visit the U.S. Army Library at Klebér Kaserne or Vogelweh to check out all those favorite old classics of science fiction, which brought me right home like no other remedy could. About the same time, James Tiptree, Jr.'s (mysterious CIA analyst Alice Bradley Sheldon) 1973 anthology 20,000 Light Years from Home reached the AFEES bookstores in Europe, and of course I had to read it to the Rolling Stones' December 1967 release of 2000 Light Years From Home. The song was supposedly designed to freak people out on LSD trips, but it was just as effective for naive young American GIs stationed far from The World.

So I sat at my little desk on a day off, in the warmth of a dry little apartment in gray, drizzly Kaiserslautern. In a corner near me, behind a couch, were piled my old-fashioned steel pot helmet with camouflage cover, my web belts, and other alerts-gear. In another corner, a coke stove (Koks, briquettes) hissed gently and sent steam up the accordion pipes to the rooftop chimney. Gray clouds outside the droplet-squiggly windows were sooty from many thousands of such chimneys around town, atop red-clay-tile roofs dripping and gurgling with runoff. I'd have a local brew (BBK or Parkbräu, I forget which, or maybe a fresh Beck's or a Bitburg Pils) at one elbow, and an ashtray full of U.S. cigarette butts at the other. That's how it was done in those days. Very earnestly, I researched a yellowing old Writer's Market for clues. I found a sign of hope in Len Isaacs, then listed as head of the Clarion SF and Fantasy Workshop. That is a genre equivalent of mainstream fiction's renowned Iowa Workshops.

The Oldest Shit-plot in History. To my surprise, I received a really nice letter from none other than Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Joe Haldeman (The Forever War). Len Isaacs had perhaps made teh military connection, or maybe it was that Joe Haldeman, a disabled Vietnam combat veteran, was then President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Joe graciously read all twelve stories and sent me a brief critique on each. For two of them, he wrote me letters of introduction to the editors in chief of two leading SF/F magazines. In those letters, he said words to the effect that I was a deserving and talented writer, and 'the Green Machine has John temporarily socked away in Germany.' The little critiques were kind, though honest, and tended to speak vastly more of my potential than of any accomplishments. One of the stories he liked was about a male and female of ambiguous origin (which seemed suspenseful in itself, since we never learned if they were human or alien (by our subjective point of view). I don't remember the title, off hand, nor do I probably still have a copy. Time does that to things both inanimate (like cars, homes, and shoes) or living things (men, women, children, stories). The style of this particular little tale was, he said, not only fine art, but very inventive. He praised its music, its tonality, and most of all its poetic innovation of a cosmic weaver who spins galaxies and universes, and causes smaller things like love, mornings, and hand-holding on fresh beaches. Unfortunately, he told me, it was in reality just another Adam and Eve story, which he called 'the oldest shit-plot in history.' In many ways, as I was warned years before, Lit studies nearly destroyed my potential as a popular author. Then again, I started my writing life at an early age, as a lyric poet, so the egg came before the chicken.

Plenty of plot, but hardly any story? What the hell did that mean? Very ominously and tooth-gnashingly, I understood in my very bowels and vowels that, unless and until I mastered that opaque and oblivious secret, I would never be a successful author by any real standard. Terry Carr, one of the great anthologists, said so definitively, by damning my story with faint praise.

I didn't get it then, but I do now. Since Joe had written one of his two letters of introduction on this story, I promptly mailed letters and stories off. One resulted in a form letter rejection; who knows what happened; maybe Ed Ferman at the Magazine of F&SF thought I had purloined Joe's letterhead somehow. Never occurred to me to imagine such a thing, so naive was I. For the other submission, Joe had chosen for me one of the great anthologists of imaginative literature at that time, Terry Carr. Terry liked the story but rejected it with regret. Having much later edited an SF/F/H magazine myself (Far Sector SFFH) I understand what it is to pass on a not-quite-polished gem. Over nearly a decade, from 1998 to 2007, we read thousands of stories. I will never need to buy paper clips, since I accumulated a potful, before we switched to digital-only submissions after the 2001 anthrax scares. But that's 20 years later. Len Isaacs thought enough of my work, when I was a young soldier in Germany, during the 1970s, to send my stories to Joe. Mr. Haldeman, in turn, was kind enough to read it, and further introduced me to a dialogue with the great Terry Carr, remains a treasured event in my professional life as a writer. Terry Carr made some nice comments, and I (absurdly) responded with a mild protest letter, to which he responded (yes, I was that naive, and he was that generous) with a cryptic-seeming remark that bothered me for years:

"Your story has plenty of plot, even as short as it is, but very little in the way of story."

Lots of Plot, Too Little Story OMG! What did this mean? If I could solve this cryptic puzzle, perhaps I could become a published author. Lest we introduce here the print vs. digital argument that middlemen no longer impede our luck as writers, think again. Those of us who self-publish should be so lucky as to have editors or advisors like Joe Haldeman or Terry Carr to remind us of the basic law of show biz: it's the readers that count, and nothing else. All the middlemen in the world but serve this, our greatest and only master or mistress. But that's a column for another day. Suffice it to say, here was something that might as well be a cryptic inscription from ancient Rome, like the Sator Enigma which scholars, despite centuries of labor, have been unable to properly translate or explicate (until, I must humbly admit, I accomplished both in 2007); a bit of sunshine must fall on every parade. But I will tell you the secret in a moment.

How (Not) To Tell A Joke Fast-forward about two years after my discourse with Messrs. Haldeman and Carr. I was on a tour bus in Rome, Italy, with a party of English-speaking tourists who had too much to drink and many jokes to tell. I learned something terrible about myself that sunny day, as we careened among marble and granite buildings in the Eternal City. One by one, the jokesters told their send-ups and punch lines, and we all rolled in the aisles with laughter. At some point, utterly sober, I started to tell some dumb joke half-remembered from high school. I realized as I was telling it that the telling was going horribly wrong. I could see the lights going out in my audience's eyes, and the pity starting to rise. By the time I remembered the punch line, it fell as flat as the Tiber Delta (Latium, the Flat Land). I turned redder than a tomato, and hunched down while someone mercifully picked up the baton and got people laughing again. I thought about it. Can a person who cannot tell a simple joke actually hope to relate a short story or a novel? I doubted it, and felt deeply sick inside myself. I felt a ton of failure settling like a sack of moldy potatoes on my shoulders.

Post Mortimer, Punch Lines I realized I had violated every rule of proper story telling. It sounds effortless when an expert tells a story or even a little joke. The fact is that every famous comedian or comedienne, while they have their natural sparkle and wit, actually practices endlessly to get a routine perfect. It has to be perfect. It cannot be just okay, or kind of funny. It has to be perfect, because the audience expects it, and the competition is too great. It's the same thing with writing stories, or telling a joke. It took me a long time, but I learned some jokes, and how to tell them with ease. People laughed. Sometimes they'd laugh and hold their noses, but you knew you'd scored a hit when, half an hour later, you'd see that same person telling your joke to a rapt audience out in the parking lot.

My disastrous, failed joke on that tour bus was, as you might have guessed, all plot and no story. It dawned on me finally—are you paying rapt attention?—that I had all the technical aspects, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I don't know if I had a hook, or a climax, or a denouement, but my joke sucked despite its technical perfection. On top of it all, I had lost faith in myself in mid-joke, and my listeners instantly caught on. I vowed that nothing like that would ever happen to me again, and it hasn't. Gradually, I also made an intellectual and analytical connection with my failed short story and Terry Carr's cryptic advice. Years later, it made more and more sense to me, in the light of what I learned on that tour bus.

How (Yes) To Tell A Joke, or a Novel The discussion of whether you should plot your novel to the scene level, or if you should do the opposite and start writing without a written roadmap, or something inbetween, is a separate subject for another day. This is strictly about being an entertainer with a pen, or a keyboard. You have to tell a story so that you touch your audience in some powerful way. It has to come alive inside of their heads and, more importantly, their hearts. That is why so many seemingly trivial, highly sentimental stories work well for large audiences. The menu promises the meal they actually get, which is the meal they buy because they wanted that meal. To tell a joke, you have to find that way of projecting yourself from the hip, so that your chin points into the listeners' face and they cannot escape your verbal petard. You skewer them with your self-confidence and insistence on delivering a well-cooked steak to order (mixing metaphors with exuberant glee). It's not enough to plot something out. You have to put your heart into it, and hear it from the listener's point of view. Does it connect the plot points with a tissue of emotional experience that rings true? How do you do that? By looking into your heart for the tendrils of your own humanity and your place among humankind. Have you suffered? Have you laughed? Are your characters real, or are they hemorrhex? Wait, I have a more concrete way to describe what mean.

Tomatoes and Shaving Cream on the Docks Two different friends, at differing times in my life, had read some of my earlier writings, and gave me their honest reactions. The thing they both stressed was about the same. I will paraphrase for effect.

X said: "I want to feel and see the tiny details. I don't want your character to shave. I want him to pull the razor over every tiny little nubble that hurts as it nearly comes loose, and some start to bleed. I want him to have tears in his eyes from the stinging pain as he stands on twisting toes to look at himself in the steamy mirror. I want to smell the lather in the hot, bluish, milky water. I want steam to rise on the cold tiles, warming them. I want the air to be so close that it feels like a rough towel. I want him to be terrified about losing his wife or his job…"

Y said: "Take me down a hot, tarry dock in lower Manhattan on a hot summer day. Make the tar be melting and smell like licorice on the splintered wood of those long rail ties that they lay down for a sturdy dock. I don't want to be told about white clouds in a blue sky; I want to hear a breeze rattling in the rigging of sailboats as fleecy wispy clouds drive by in a sky the color of fresh baby-blue paint. Make the boats at anchor rock gently amid bottle-green water full of floating orange peels, twisty plastic sacks, rainbow puddles of gasoline, and soaked newspapers. I want to be assaulted by the stink of a dead, floating rat half eaten by fish and crabs. I want to turn away, and instantly smell cotton candy, perfume, and plastic beach balls. I want to see the dimples in the buttocks of the beautiful young girls in their bikinis. I want to see the abs on the young men courting them. I want to smell pomade in the boys' butch cuts, and the hair spray in the girls' bouffant hairdos. I want to hear them talking, and laughing, with rock music hits throbbing from boom boxes. Put me in that moment with every ounce of writer that you hope to be. I am dead, and I want you to bring me back to life on a hot, sunny day that smells of smoke, and frying fish, and freshly poured beer…"

To be perfectly honest, I cannot retell their instructions in their masterful way. But I think I manage to convey the idea. Plot is secondary. You have to bring the reader to an experience that will change his or her life. You do that by evoking a scene, even just a moment, that becomes as real a part of their memories as their very own life. That is what Terry Carr meant when he said my story was missing story. It's like saying "There was no there there." To successfully tell a novel, a short story, or even a joke, we have to create a flow of life, mimicking life, as if we are squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, only we are laying down a strip of events in real (virtual) time.

Next Week, Part 2: Time and Story In the conclusion of this article, next Friday (April 1st, no joke!) we will visit this topic in depth again, and explore how plot is no-time, while story actually takes the reader through fictional (virtual) time.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and explain it plausibly. A production company for the History Channel has flown him to Yale University, from his home in San Diego, for an interview next to the exemplar from Dura Europos in modern Syria. The episode, in which he is capstone speaker, is to be aired across the USA and Canada by the History Channel.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.