The Core of Each Convincing Moment . . . and Cricket Bats

By Joel E. Turner

As a writer, I am not a big craft guy. Workshops, story arcs, x-act structures, beats . . . I get that they can all help people and perhaps I’d be a better writer if I steeped myself in that stuff. In my formative years (hopefully I can still be formed, or maybe reformed), my favorite contemporary writers were William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Did any of them have MFA’s?
 
Of course, I have come to know and read some very good writers who went down that path, so more power to them, to each his own, etc.
 
I remember reading Gore Vidal, an eloquent writer for sure, saying that he tried to write good sentences, one after the other, and that he usually had no idea what was actually going to come out on the page, even if he knew the narrative direction.
 
I saw David Lynch give a talk a few years ago, and he talked about fishing for ideas; and how he had no idea what he would find when he put a hook in the water. Given that the water was Lynch’s unconscious, I think we all would agree that there was no telling what was going to come out. But, Lynch said, you have to bait the hook.
 
To my mind, plot and story are the bait on the hook. And you hope that you catch something real, something true. How to depict reality/truth—or perhaps more properly, how to evoke it—cannot be accomplished by painting by the numbers.
 
One of the most eloquent artists on the creative process was Francis Bacon, whose alarming and grotesque images seemed to come with no precedent. Bacon was dismissive of Abstract Expressionism and abstract painting in general, and believed that art was a duality, that it was reporting/recording. He wanted to find ways to “trap the fact”, as he put it, that he was obsessed by.
He makes a very interesting comment about this Rembrandt self-portrait:

“If you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence . . . you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks . . . That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you’re just making another form of illustration.  . . . In this Rembrandt self-portrait, there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image.” 1
 
Now writing is not painting. William S. Burroughs is almost alone in introducing chance into the writing process through his cut-up and fold-in methods, which mixed up his own prose with those of Kafka, Conrad, Joyce and others, resulting in passages like this, near the close of Nova Express:
 
“The great wind revolving turrets towers palaces—Insubstantial sound and image flakes fall—Through all the streets time for him to forbear—Blest be he on walls and windows people and sky—On every part of your dust falling softly—falling in the dark mutinous ‘No more’— . . . Melted into air—all the living and dead . . .” 2
There are bits of the close of Joyce’s “The Dead” here and who knows what else. When I was quite young, and probably quite stoned, I did some cut-up experiments and actually used a few bits of the result in my first published story, which had a fairly conventional dystopian plot.
 
I do not attempt now to introduce chance or accident into my work the way that Bacon or Burroughs would. Writing is a different modality than painting, Burroughs experiments notwithstanding.
 
But accident plays a part in writing. As you being to write a passage, the hook baited with the scene or character, what comes out on the page reflects the accident-filled operation of your mind as it strings together words. That is where the art—at least a large portion of the art to my thinking—occurs.
 
And even in plotting this occurs. You may be working on the plot in an outline or notes, and you encounter suddenly, coming from nowhere, a new—a truer—formulation of what will happen as the reality of the characters and their situation forces the truth to come out.
 
Joseph Conrad’s Preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus” is amazingly, touchingly and profoundly eloquent on the writing process and echoes these thoughts:
 
“There is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity.  The task . . . is to hold up unquestioningly the rescued fragment . . . to show its vibration its colour, its form . . . to disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. 3
 
I urge any writer, and readers for that matter, to read the entire Preface. Conrad never says how this can be done—of course. There is no way to tell someone how to do this.
 
I will leave you with the words of another absolute writing master, Tom Stoppard, from his play The Real Thing. The character speaking is a writer who has been asked by his spouse to punch up the politically-motivated yet artless prose of her protégé. He is exasperated with the task and explains how to think about writing:
 
“This [cricket bat] here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together . . . so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout. What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw them up an idea and give it a little knock it might travel.”
 
(He picks up the offending script). No what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting “Ouch!”
(Indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy . . . to keep cudgels out of Lords [a cricket venue]. It’s better because it’s better.” 4
 
Thus, the offending script is not “The Real Thing”. Of course Stoppard’s writer/character, Henry, also accuses Bach of stealing “Air on a G String” from “A Whiter Shade of Pale”:
 
Annie: It’s Bach
Henry: The cheeky beggar.
Annie: What?
Henry: He’s stolen it.
Annie: Bach?
Henry: Note for note. Practically a straight lift from Procul Harum. And he can’t even get it right. Hang on, I’ll play you the original.
 
Well, there you have it. Don’t put your trust in writers. They’ll tell a lie every time in pursuit of the truth.
 
 
Joel E. Turner is the author of WILDWOOD EXIT, a noir tale set at the Jersey Shore, published by Level Best Books in 2025.
 
You can find more of Joel E. Turner’s writing, including fiction and musings on literature, music and movies at joeleturnerauthor.com.
 
Footnotes:
 
1.David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1969, (Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 58.
2.William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), 154.
3.Joseph Conrad, Tales of Land and Sea, (Garden City, New York: Hanover House, [1897] 1953), 106-107.
4.Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 1982), 51.
5.Stoppard, The Real Thing, 74.

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