A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic - Softcover

Turchi, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595347593 ISBN 13: 9781595347596

Publisher: Trinity University Press, 2015

Synopsis

With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic the creation of credible illusion that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.

In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process.

With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer’s relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty.

While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D’Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title’s double entendre, A Muse and a Maze.

With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell’s famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today’s latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Turchi's books include Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. Turchi's short story "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002 by the editors of Best American Short Stories and one of 15 Recommended Stories by the jury for the O. Henry Prize Stories, has been published in Arabic and, in English, combined with images by Charles Ritchie, in a limited edition artist's book. He has also coedited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Turchi's stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review. He has received Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1993 to 2008 he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Turchi recently taught at Arizona State University, where he was director of the creative writing program, and he's currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE CONTEMPLATION OF RECURRING PATTERNS [introduction]

Endlessly retyped, [the novel looked] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as they labored . . . bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing.”
Michael Korda, on editor Robert Gottlieb’s work with Joseph Heller on Catch-22

Every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. This is true not only of a complex satirical novel but of a Shakespearean sonnet, an autobiographical essay, a play or screenplay, a love letter, and an email to a colleague about a problem at work. Whom do we address? With what tone? How should we begin? What do we want the reader to think or feel or understand? Is it best to be direct or indirect, sincere or disarming? Should we start with a joke? A quotation?

There are many different kinds of puzzles, but generally speaking, a puzzle is an array of material or information that requires a solution. Let’s say a woman has a job, she works hard, but at the end of the month she doesn’t have enough money to pay her bills. Circumstances have presented her with a puzzle, a problem to solve. She could take on a second job, or stop eating out, or rob a convenience store all possible solutions but instead she decides to write a letter to her employer asking for a raise. The composition of that letter is another puzzle. Should it be a demand or a request? How should she support her argument? Should she mention that she’s paying her mother’s medical bills? It’s a large company, very professional, so she decides she should simply state the circumstances, offering a few highlights of her excellent work and its benefits to the company. She deliberates over whether to issue an ultimatum ( More money, or off I go”) or to acknowledge her employer’s perspective ( These are difficult times, so if the budget won’t allow it now, maybe next year?”). She decides not to mention that she knows two less-experienced men in her office are being paid higher salaries not yet, anyway. Has she chosen well, arranged all the pieces successfully? She’ll know as soon as she gets her response.

A short story or novel is a different kind of puzzle; and it is more than a puzzle.

The composition of a story is a puzzle for the writer, whose job is to decide what to include, what to exclude, and how to organize the parts. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as fiction writers, we begin to write without knowing precisely what we’re trying to create. The work continually changes form, and emphasis, and purpose. Characters disappear, new characters are added; some scenes grow longer, others are reduced to summary. A pocket watch that just happened to be in a dresser drawer suddenly seems to indicate something larger. We can’t truly solve the puzzle, or arrange the words and sentences and characters and events most effectively, until we finally feel confident that we understand what we’re trying to create.

But while composing a piece of fiction is like assembling a puzzle, the finished work is not presented by the writer as a puzzle for the reader to solve. There may be puzzles within the story, elements of plot or character or imagery or meaning that require the reader’s active participation, but the story as a whole is not a problem with a solution. Like Ariadne’s thread allowing Theseus to journey into and safely out of the mythical labyrinth, a story means to lead the reader somewhere. But the destination isn’t a monster, or a pot of gold, or a bit of wisdom. Instead, the destination is something or several things to contemplate. The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder. How do we know that? Because the books and stories and poems that mean the most to us are the ones we want to read again, to reexperience and reconsider.

****

Magic is an art very closely related to poetry. The poet manipulates words, and the magician manipulates objects. We are transcending reality in order to produce something poetic, something beautiful, something interior.”
Spanish magician Juan Tamariz

The word magic” is commonly used to refer both to a ritualized performance with a long history (the ancient Greeks wrote about magi, or magicians) and, more vaguely, to something transcendent that the speaker either can’t or would rather not explain ( That night in Venice was magic, just plain magic”). The history of magic is richly populated with scientists and mathematicians, inventors and entertainers, gamblers, thieves, and con men. Professional magicians tend not to refer to what they do as tricks,” since that implies gimmickry a trap door, a hollow pencil, a coin with a hole drilled through its center. The preferred term is illusion,” which can apply to effects facilitated by a mechanical device (a trap door, a hollow pencil, a drilled coin) as well as to those facilitated by skill and practice (a playing card palmed on the back of the hand, a deck cut to the exact same card ten times out of ten), and to those facilitated by surprising scientific and mathematical principles. Many card tricks are based on simple but non-obvious math.

A magical illusion is a puzzle for the magician who, like that woman hoping for a raise, imagines an intended effect (a rabbit produced from a hat that appeared to be empty) and then organizes his materials, movements, words, and gestures to create that effect for an audience. In theory, the illusion is a puzzle for the audience, too (Where did that rabbit come from?). But the sort of person inclined to watch a magic show is the sort of person who, while understanding that there must be a perfectly mundane explanation for how the illusion was created, simultaneously hopes to be moved to a state of wonder in the same way that a reader who picks up a new novel hopes to be transported by mere ink on paper, the arrangement of words on a page.

The composer of a puzzle means to present a challenge, but also intends for his audience to solve it. A magician presents an illusion with the understanding that, while it can be solved,” or explained, his purpose is to disguise that solution so we can experience something that, however briefly, transcends rational understanding. It’s tempting to say that a writer, then, is a kind of magician. A writer gives us a story not to provoke us to admire how it was produced, or to challenge us to tease out some hidden or coded message, but to invite us to think about something he or she has found worthy of extended consideration. But unlike a magical illusion, some of the most powerful effects of a story, poem, or novel, actually do transcend rational explanation. Discussions of the writer’s craft, of conscious decisions, can take us only so far. There’s mystery in it for the writer as well as for readers.

*****

Puzzles are not solved by the use of accurate reckoning alone . . . but also by a substantial use of insight thinking [an admixture of imagination and memory]. Insight thinking does not emerge fortuitously or haphazardly. It comes about only after the observation and contemplation of recurring patterns.”
Marcel Danesi

The writer’s craft is what we can study; and by looking carefully at the work that speaks most strongly to us we can, gradually, discern patterns, choices, and decisions we find effective.

Our curiosity, our interest in problems, means that many of us get pleasure from writing that yields more each time we read or see or hear it. Happily, there are plenty of stories and novels that offer up both immediate pleasure and the rewards that come from prolonged meditation. The challenge for writers is to arrange information words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, images in ways that are intriguing, arresting, curiosity-arousing, and illuminating. In any particular story, novel, or poem (or essay, play, or screenplay), we need to regard how we’re arranging that information, for whom, and why.

That’s what this book is about.

This book is not so much a sequel but a companion to Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Both books are, at least in part, about ways in which a piece of writing is designed. They both mean to invite writers to think differently about what we do. (That first-person plural pronoun is generally used to refer to writers, but also at times to readers, under the assumption that all writers read.) While the two books overlap in places, and some of the same authors are mentioned, I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary repetition. In Maps of the Imagination, it seemed useful to focus on the extended metaphor and to offer brief illustrations from a wide variety of writers. The topics contemplated here seemed better investigated by more detailed discussions. In several places I refer to visual artist Charles Ritchie, whose work and process served as initial inspiration. While the primary focus is on fiction, much of what is here could apply to any form of writing.

The chapters that follow consider the tension between puzzle and mystery; the gaps and contradictions that make fictional characters nearly as complex as actual people; the writer as a magician, directing the audience’s attention away from himself and toward a created representative; the maze we find ourselves in when we try to follow the narrative line”; and our desire, as readers and as writers, for challenge, as perverse as that sometimes seems. Appearing along the way are Jerry Seinfeld, Harry Houdini, Bruce Springsteen, The Wizard of Oz, Wassily Kandinsky, tangrams, famous Norwegians, reindeer hunters, and a disappearing elephant. You’ll also encounter a variety of puzzles, which can be ignored or solved; the solutions appear in the notes to each chapter. If you’d like to try your hand at the tangrams, you can cut out the pieces on the last page of the book.

Art is often discussed as a form of play but that playfulness, that sense of delight, is frequently absent from discussions of the writing process, and of what we tend to call the work.” But even T. S. You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy” Eliot was a fan of the Marx Brothers. No matter how serious the tone, literature offers pleasure in its construction as well as in its content, and in the ways it connects us to others. While it’s possible to forget, as we push ourselves to revise and improve, we write because it gives us at least occasionally delight. This book, then, is offered as a provocation, a companion, and a reminder of the joy writing offers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1595347593
• ISBN 13: 9781595347596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248