More Humor and Pathos

Still hung up on humor and pathos

Historical fiction writer retires from the humor and pathos of the corporate maze into which too many good people get lost. Before I go, I think I should write a book about my last experience where so little humor and too much pathos aptly describes my last “day” job. You see, I have come to the conclusion, after so much pathos and so little humor, that I am absolutely through with that part of the world in which I don’t belong. I think I will call my book something like “When on a Sinking Ship Find the Wine Cellar.” This new book will not be anything at all like my last titles, Dancing Backward in Paradise and Hearts Upon a Fragile Bough. Oh, no, it will be a horror, fantasy. Told with humor and pathos, of course.

I have nothing nice to say about the witches I left behind, the caldron I narrowly escaped. At first, I thought they were all a bunch of friendly grandmothers, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, let me tell you, these plump, suburban looking sweeties had more rev in their engines than a corvette in a no speed zone. Looks are certainly deceiving. They were as ruthless as any bully boy I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with more than a few of those. When I use the term “ruthless,” I refer to a cold, calculating deadness that personifies their lack of humanity. These pleasant little witches can best be described as sour, limited and lacking in foresight, grace, and overall integrity. Yes, they can teach little children to read, maybe. Or maybe the ego behind their tax shelter merely likes spending money.

I’m glad I’m a writer. I can put it all into a book. That’s right, a fantasy book. Okay, my main character will be Crafty Clarissa, the one with the night terrors. Jeez, am I surprised? If I had her life I’d have night terrors too. She’s really messed up, this crafty little witch. She likes to seek out suckers for her caldron, led there by false promises and desperation. Oh, then there’s Crafty Clarissa’s sidekick. She’s the one that makes the brew for Crafty Clarissa’s caldron. She makes the brew because she can’t really do anything else, aside from talking marvelously on her cell phone. We’ll call her Marvelous Talk. Marvelous Talk lights the fire under Crafty Clarissa’s caldron and cooks all the suckers Crafty Clarissa has lured into the bubbly highly toxic brew.

Then there’s this little elf, a rather annoying little do-gooder who eats the cooked suckers and falls into a swoon before the feet of Marvelous Talk and Crafty Clarissa. We’ll call her Daffy Waffy. She’s really annoying.

As the plot unfolds, we find that Crafty Clarissa emasculates her husband. Are we surprised? Marvelous Talk fantasizes all day that lesbians are everywhere, and perhaps even the Big Honcho Witch, Wow Wow, and her esteemed lackey, Twitchy Bissy, are a very ambiguous item.

Needless to say, Wow Wow and Twitchy Bissy are not really creative enough for lesbian activity but Marvelous Talk swears that lesbians are everywhere. You know, like Gail and Oprah? Betty and Veronica? Calamity Jane? She confides her fears to Crafty Clarissa, who upon hearing this, undergoes an increase in night terrors.

So, as the story progresses, Little elf, Daffy Waffy, accidently falls into the caldron meant for an innocent little four year old, who has developed a stutter from reading too many of Wow Wow’s decodable horror stories. Wow Wow writes horror stories for children because, according to Marvelous Talk, she’s bi-Polar, a real horror, if you get my drift. Well, when poor little Daffy Waffy gets wind of this, she throws herself into Crafty Clarissa’s cauldron and sizzles in hot oil. Needless to say, she’s a goner. But she does manage to toss the dazed four year old to the safety of the fairy tale section of Barnes and Noble.

But don’t fret, this little ditty somehow has a happy ending because the real heroine, Me, (let’s call her Victory Vera) finds the wine cellar. Oh, in the end, Crafty Clarissa and Marvelous Talk are devoured by wild salesmen, who really don’t like amateurs. The slimy little witches were noticed at a Super Duper Reading convention and tossed back into oblivion, where hopefully, they will remain behind the pages of their hooey, gooey word walls.

Now that I’m back in one piece, I’ve decided I really like real estate. When working with a witch, you can refer them out.

Vera Jane Cook

Award Winning Must Read Women’s Fiction. Dancing Backward In Paradise was published in November 2006 and received rave reviews from Armchair Interviews and Midwest Book reviews, as well as an Eric Hoffer and Indie Excellence award in the Literary fiction category for notable new fiction in 2007. Hearts Upon a Fragile Bough, Ms. Cook’s second novel, was published this year and will be followed by its sequel, At the End of a Whisper, in 2010. To learn more about her books you can visit her web site at www.verajanecook.com

To contact the author send an email to jane@verajanecook.com

Plots are amazing, especially when you complete one, when you pull the strings toward you and hear the snap. I dream about plots. I try to walk about a mile a day so that I can think about plots. The most difficult thing a writer will ever do is to find a coherent place of burial for the carefully crafted characters who so willingly allow their futures to be synthesized in the hands of their often, clueless creators.

I have been reading literature for a long time and I’m always amazed at well crafted plots, succinct stories that come from writers like Anita Shreve and Sue Monk Kidd. They write masterful plots. They create fine lines that tie together with golden bands, leaving the reader with the sighs of a well told story, a world entered and exited with the utmost attention to detail.

Then, there are a few of my other heroes. For instance, Wally Lamb and Caleb Carr who write plots that are like vast oceans, and once adrift in them, you fear for your life: God, where is this going? But then, miraculously you are placed on the shore like a well fed baby, giggling and cooing for more kisses.

I have learned about writing from reading other people’s novels. I have learned more than any professor of creative writing could teach me. And I’m not putting down creative writing professors because I taught creative writing once upon a time, back before I ever got hooked on plotting a novel. Yes, back then, I enjoyed poems and stories I could end quickly. Now I understand why. Creating plot is like starting with a seed and trusting that all the branches will bloom. You plot along with an obsessive willingness to craft a journey worth taking.

I have completed seven novels, two are published and two more are in process. In process means I am adrift in the sea of imagination, logical conclusions and satisfying endings. Not that I was satisfied with the ending of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, or Cold Mountain. I was devastated and sad, and tried to find peace in the ultimate belief that heaven is real and both dogs and star crossed lovers can reunite. I don’t know if I want to make my readers sad, but I don’t necessarily want to make them happy either. I have to give LuAnne Rice credit, she is a real Irish poet, emotional and romantic and following her tight and repetitive plots your tear ducts will get a work out, but she always returns us to the shores of satisfaction, where all is well.

I wonder if I want a happy ending for my latest character, a woman near seventy, who has certainly lived her life with regrets, heartache, and moments of tender reminisces. I wonder if I will allow her shattered illusions to heal her, or harden her? I think people near seventy years old have a lot to say and I think their lives are a mirror into what we will all face, what we will all feel when we look around the younger world and no longer see our image.

I recently worked a day job with much younger people and the arrogance overfloweth. I felt like an alien on my own planet. But, in actuality, they were the aliens. Their womb was my history and their future is my triumph.  They live in a blind present, a decaying bubble that tries not to show its soul, the one that is aging, bargaining and aching.  I think that’s why I wanted to write my most recent book. My story is a world within a world within a world. And all the inner worlds are what has been lost, reinvented, misinterpreted and rediscovered. I wanted to look through my character’s eyes and see how the mindless illusions of youth granted my heroine the wisdom of indifference and a shedding of all superfluity.

But how do I end my story? I alone can tie in the great journey of aging in a young world and I can bring her home or send her out to sea. But then, I think of a few of my heroes. What would Wally Lamb have done, for instance? Well, I think he would have held me in his long emotional plot, angered me with so many words, confused me with new information, but ultimately, like his characters, I would heal and I would emerge back into the vortex of his vision, where all is treated kindly and felt most deeply. Perhaps, that’s where every plot should lead … toward an inevitable and very human victory.

Vera Jane Cook

Award Winning Must Read Women’s Fiction. Dancing Backward In Paradise was published in November 2006 and received rave reviews from Armchair Interviews and Midwest Book reviews, as well as an Eric Hoffer and Indie Excellence award in the Literary fiction category for notable new fiction in 2007. Hearts Upon a Fragile Bough, Ms. Cook’s second novel, was published this year and will be followed by its sequel, At the End of a Whisper, in 2010. To learn more about her books you can visit her web site at www.verajanecook.com

To contact the author send an email to jane@verajanecook.com

I found myself sitting in the HR department of one of the most famous companies in America. My ice queen soon to be boss wanted me and I knew it. After all, I had graduated from a pseudo impressive university and I looked really good in my Ann Klein suit. Problem was, I’d never worked a day in Corporate America and I had just turned fifty. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks but the bills were piling up and the only place my freedom loving artistic spirit had gotten me was down and out in New York City.

I was offered the job; mostly because the actress in me conjured up Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, a dash of Faye Dunaway in Network and I performed a nifty little improve using the shrewd and sassy elegance of Judy Holiday and Melanie Griffith, as rather impressive role models. My stunning performance worked and there I was, embraced by my new corporate family and occasionally loaned back out to the rest of society, my pet Pomeranian and my old disco buddies.

After filling the pages of my gratitude journal for six months, and thanking the universe for this rather prestigious position, the honeymoon wore off and I became increasingly shell shocked. My co-workers were very strange indeed. I didn’t feel that they were family, but that’s what having a job is called on the Planet Corporate: family. Oh, they like putting us in teams, too. Teams connote competition and a great rah, rah spirit. In my old world they called it “opening night.” Here they call it “making goal.” As you can imagine, I was confused.

I had a hard time understanding these people. They talked about nothing that would interest me, they thought they were too sexy for their underwear, and most of them didn’t even remember the moon walk! When they weren’t obsessing on how low the sales numbers were, they were holding meetings in which nothing was said. They also spent a lot of time debating whether or not the Bachelor would chose the blonde or the tenacious little redhead. I was beginning to feel quite invisible. I mean, who cares?

The first time I heard I had a direct report I thought I was going to be interviewing the bimbo under thirty year old receptionist who excelled in condescending. The first time I was called a subordinate, I almost wept aloud. Jeez, if I wanted to be subordinate to anyone I would have married my ex.

Then I was told I was getting a performance review. Well, finally something to look forward to. I was happy at last. Surely, my calculated persona as a prisoner in pin stripes was impressive. Why, I learned to click down the hallowed halls of this very famous corporation in three inch heels. I found the perfect skirt length and kept my nails conservatively French tipped. I even talked numbers all day, like they were as important as season tickets to the Round About Theater, and I pretended to be in a constant state of urgency so my boss would think I was absolutely taking years off my life to make my impossible sales goal.

Well, you could have knocked me over in a breath when I discovered that a performance review was actually based on whether or not I was selling anything. Disappointingly, my review was moderate to cold. I felt that I wanted to crawl under a rock and not emerge until I figured out how to increase the money my company made off the ninety percent of my life it was taking.

So be it. I licked my wounds and went on like a good soldier. These people were expanding my sales goal wider than a middle age waist line, but still, I persisted. I plodded along, cursing my fate and trying to figure out if I’d enjoy driving a cab for a living and conversing with people who’d heard of Fellini and didn’t think Horn & Hardart was a circus act.

Finally, some good news from the Planet of the Corporate: We were all going on a retreat. I joyously ran out to buy a yoga mat, karma sutra oil to share with colleagues, hot pink sweatpants and new Addidas. I couldn’t want to chant with my corporate family. I was ecstatic.

But then, the bomb fell. I was both surprised and appalled. My corporate family was thrusting me into a hotel room with another adult, asking me to share the spit and spittle of sleep, the intimacy of bodily woes and the loss of privacy on my frequent calls home to the dog walker. That did it. I rebelled. I wore the new Addidas and the hot pink sweats to their all day meetings on how to sell more stuff. I chanted enthusiastically during the power lunch and used some little book on cheese they gave me as a place mat for the very gooey award night dinner.

Wouldn’t you know it, I was written up. At first I thought I’d earned some good review on the little monologue I gave to the company president on corporate greed. Not so, I was put on probation and sent home to watch Oprah, listen to the Secret and meditate on changing my life as I sat by the Hudson with my Pomeranian re-reading What Color Is Your Parachute?

After two weeks, I was back on the planet Corporate wondering how I’d get through it. I couldn’t quit, it was already going to take me two years to get out of the debt I’d accumulated relying on an income doing extra film work and occasional voice overs for pharmaceutical drug companies. I needed the damn job. But something had shifted for me during my little reprisal from the bull pen of consumption. Maybe it was Oprah, maybe the law of attraction really works. I sure was intending to alter my present state. And it happened before I could say “you’re really not too sexy for your underwear.”

Once I began writing my novel, the words just flowed. I wrote and I wrote till my little fingers twitched. My life was altered forever by that simple action. I now started to wake at five A.M. with a passion I hadn’t felt in years. I threw myself at the keyboard for an hour or more. I filled my weekends weaving a story, creating characters that I couldn’t get enough of. My joy was abundant.

Wouldn’t you know it? The bull pen became tolerable. Even the ice queen melted a bit and the complicated hidden agendas of coworkers became insignificant. My head was filled with plot and character. Who cares who wants my head on a corporate silver platter? What cared I for corporate agendas when my chapters flowed off the page? I thought about nothing else. My sales numbers even increased, as did my tolerance for the ice queens and the age discriminatory wooly bully boys on the Planet Corporate who, tipping way past the age of forty, were not at all too sexy for their underwear. How strange it all was.

So, I stole back my time. I found a place that I wanted to be. You might say I took back my soul to write. I would advise anyone out there who has found themselves on an alien planet, to follow their passion, as well, even if it doesn’t get you back on the planet Earth right away. I can assure you that eventually, it will, one way or the other. You see, your freedom will come out of the creation and your joy is in action, not the inaction of just feeling miserable. Writing is a place no one can enter or soil with demands you may never reach and definitions that limit you. So, find your book and write it. If you don’t, your Corporate family will become the title of your life, and the spirit who longs to fly free will lose touch with the words that might have been, and the key to the door not taken.

Vera Jane Cook

Award Winning Must Read Women’s Fiction. Dancing Backward In Paradise was published in November 2006 and received rave reviews from Armchair Interviews and Midwest Book reviews, as well as an Eric Hoffer and Indie Excellence award in the Literary fiction category for notable new fiction in 2007. Hearts Upon a Fragile Bough, Ms. Cook’s second novel, was published this year and will be followed by its sequel, At the End of a Whisper, in 2010. To learn more about her books you can visit her web site at www.verajanecook.com

To contact the author send an email to jane@verajanecook.com

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Time in film is often an artful edit, a story told in film language. When I was in college I had a brilliant  professor who taught me to ‘read’ film, not just see it, or feel it. Film is the great language of symbolism, verisimilitude deconstructed, syntagmatic readings of the psyche in juxtaposition. Propaganda in filmic doses . Montage in the hands of editors and directors who cut into our linear perception and twist the lens of our subconscious, where privacy is vulnerable to the violation.

But what of time in fiction? Is being linear playing it safe? If my characters think in present time their thoughts are random, and like dreams, scuffle and shuffle to their own music. Sometimes, as I sit here in the present I get a flash of myself in 1970. A moment later, I recall the face of someone I knew in 1990. Words flow that might never have existed, emotions surface I might never have felt, but for several seconds, I am transported outside of myself, and the comfort of the present tense, which pales next to the time travel of mental ellipses and the rewriting of history.

In retrospection, time is tempered, retold, suppressed, reanalyzed and reevaluated. But, alas, my life is not a novel. Form is not owed to the randomness of my memories. However, what I have in common with my characters is that we think of what we will do, and have done, more often than what we’re doing right now. The present only holds me by action. When action is broken by inaction, the past surfaces like celluloid negatives. Memories, without warning, appear like burps and cause reactions that settle in the unconscious mind like mine fields. What we recall is sometimes like a bullet, aimed at the heart and meant to shatter the safety of distance.

I keep going back to this one novel of mine that is already written, but probably won’t be published for a couple of years. I keep returning to it because of the issue of time, which has begun to fascinate me. The five characters in my novel are tied together through the past. A reunion is called and they attend, for reasons of their own, but certainly to move toward a linear conclusion.  Within the linear telling of the story, their recollections surface and old wounds are opened. So, the novel, in a sense, is a telling of five different interpretations of the past  within the same linear story. I can only hope my readers are not made dizzy by these journeys back to my character’s youthful regrets. After all,  memories  are out of sequence, and oftentimes, without sense, they stare back at you, even when you turn away.

I recently saw the film, Seven Pounds. It’s a good example of how time tells its own story, how memory is the root cause of action, reaction and regret. The film is also a perfect example of brilliant editing. In my heart, I am still a film student, still thinking of that syntagmatic current that manipulates our concept of realism and flirts with our perception of the linear line. I recently found myself using the present tense in a novel I’m writing, instead of the obvious past. I discovered that my character has a mind of her own. I let her have her way and decided to keep her recollections in the present tense. I overstepped a boundary. Maybe I want to jostle my reader, to claim the intimacy I lose when I say: I ran to the rhythm of my own breath; the beat of my heart provided the music of being alive. I could say:   I am running to the rhythm of my own breath; the beat of my heart provides the music of being alive.  I am no longer writing to tell you. I am writing to claim you, to make you join me, to offend the safety of the past tense with my character’s audacity.

My two published novels are tales and they are told as a linear story, but someday I will take another look at the films,  Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour. I will read them, comprehend them,  and then, do something different. I will write a book that starts at the end and ends at the beginning. I will upset my own sense of balance and never solve the riddle. Are you here today, but it was yesterday we met? Don’t you remember? Then again, perhaps, not until tomorrow, will you turn and find my eyes.  I’ll be waiting.

Vera Jane Cook

Award Winning Must Read Women’s Fiction. Dancing Backward In Paradise was published in November 2006 and received rave reviews from Armchair Interviews and Midwest Book reviews, as well as an Eric Hoffer and Indie Excellence award in the Literary fiction category for notable new fiction in 2007. Hearts Upon a Fragile Bough, Ms. Cook’s second novel, was published this year and will be followed by its sequel, At the End of a Whisper, in 2010. To learn more about her books you can visit her web site at www.verajanecook.com

To contact the author send an email to jane@verajanecook.com