I saw the bear this morning, from the big picture window in my bedroom. He was near our shed, ambling unconcerned toward the woodpile. He was a small bear, probably young, his body coal-black against the weathered planks. I caught just a glimpse before he dissolved into the green-gray tangle of woods beyond.

A few weeks ago there was another bear, or the same bear (who knows?). I’d noticed a small chunk of shadow in the woods, something that hadn’t been there the day before, not a stump or a rock. But the woods are tricky, changing every day, and I've not memorized each element of the landscape. I’ve not memorized the placement of each branch, or the way sunlight slants against each ash and pine in that particular spot in the woods, at that particular hour of morning. But I do trust my instincts, so was not surprised, just gratified, when the dark chunk moved, then resolved itself into bear face, bear ears. He paced slowly through the trees, then was no longer there, or at least no longer there to my eye.

Fifteen years ago, I saw my first bear, also from my bedroom window. He moved like flowing water over the jumble of logs just delivered for firewood. I saw my cat Juno approaching, out of friendliness or curiosity. I suspect it was Juno’s first bear, too, because he quickly realized his error and fled. I loved that bear instantly, the beauty of him. But he was also competition: Shoo, bear! Those are my blackberries, almost ripe!

This morning’s bear didn’t stay long enough. I didn’t have enough of him. I kept looking at the woods where he had entered and vanished. But it’s like watching falling stars, or fish jumping. You see one; you look where it was, then another jumps, elsewhere. You have to look nowhere if you want to see one. Sometimes, you get lucky.

 

 

I found a wild orchid growing by the stone wall. It’s nothing like the one on my kitchen table, the one brought by a guest to say thank you for a nice meal. I had said: Bring nothing. Of course she had brought something. My kitchen orchid is a phalaenopsis, a Moth Orchid, which casts a line of big, moony blooms along a single slender stalk. Many of the species are white or pink, but mine is pale yellow, veined with scarlet. It had four blooms when it landed on my table eight weeks ago, and now there are eight, with still more to come. The breeder’s hand is evident here; it’s colorful, effusive, profligate. Bred to spend the inheritance, go for broke.

The wild orchid by my wall is more demure. It’s not blooming yet, but I can already see it in my mind’s eye. I’ve been on the lookout for this orchid for three seasons, since I found a few growing in the roadside waste a half-mile from my house. “Epipactus helloborine, leaves lanceolate,” the flower guide told me. Each has a single stalk with twenty buds the size of raindrops. Each flower will be no bigger than my thumbnail; each a perfect, miniature corsage, pale green, tinged with pink. But mouths open, agog, they’ll show a deep red throat.

I had collected seeds two years ago, each as small and weightless as a speck of black pepper, and spread them in a corner of my shade garden, hoping. No orchids sprouted there last year. I found another specimen this morning, farther up the wall, so maybe my own breeder’s hand is at work after all.

There are twenty thousand species of wild orchid in the world, and fifty native to New Hampshire. Each is a tiny ecstasy. This spring, hiking the Appalachian Trail on Moose Mountain’s western shoulder, I came upon six pink lady slipper orchids, blooming in a cluster by the side of the trail. Each pointed her bulbous pink bosom a different direction, looking like nightwalkers at a shipyard: Hey, sailor. These weren’t bred for show, but you’d never know it for looking.

I check the wild hellborines almost daily, but they’re on their own, they don’t need me. My kitchen orchid is a captive, domesticated. We have a deal: I give it water, light, maybe some plant food. It might need me, but who am I to pass judgment on domestication? There are few wild humans left, few who don’t live in captivity, if we define that as a life in which inputs and outputs are circumscribed, defined.

 

 

Two evenings ago, I offered a nectarine in the mulch under one of our big birches. The fruit was tragically molding on its blossom end a day after being brought home. At $2.49 per pound, I figured it was about a dollar’s worth of exotic, rapidly decaying produce, and damned if I would eat it, but damned if I would throw it away. So I gave it away instead, to the red squirrel; someone who, I imagined, would enjoy it. Nectarines are a luxury for the squirrel, but equally so for me. Neither of us has any real right to them, transported as they are from thousands of miles away.

By morning the fruit had vanished without a trace, without evidence of either struggle or delight. I contrived a story about the squirrel finding it, licking it quickly to appraise it, then stuffing hunks of its wet yellow flesh into her cheeks and hauling off the loot to her nest in the wood’s margin. 

Last evening I scattered a small handful of moldering strawberries in the same spot, imagining the squirrel would find these, too. This morning they were still there. It had rained overnight, and the fruits were now sodden and collapsing, though still jewel-red. They’ll be gone later, though. I will not see them go. There will be no one around to witness the feast, except for the squirrel herself. So I must imagine another story, and tell it to myself again, keeping it fresh.

Or maybe I have it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the squirrel who nabbed the nectarine. Maybe it was one of the chipmunks who lives in the stone wall by the orchid. Or the bear himself, or a skunk or raccoon I’ve never met. But Occam’s razor is sharp, and I like to keep it stropped. The squirrel is the answer that makes the most sense, because I see him running up that very birch trunk every day, to taste the sap leaking from its scars.

It’s impossible to know. The squirrel ate the fruit, and also did not. Schrödinger’s cat is dead, or is alive; the observation makes it real. But doesn’t the cat know? The cat doesn’t need anyone to tell her whether she’s dead or alive. She’s around to notice.

 

 

There’s a seasonal brook in the woods behind the house. It’s alive from April through early June, then dries up, mostly, except in a fissure under a large stone, where it relaxes all summer, black and stagnant. The water is still, without percussion, no sound in any sense, imagined or real. The mouse can come to drink the idle water, and the wood thrush can wash herself, and the mosquito larvae can drift undisturbed before their hatch. The deer is too big to stand in the gap between the rock and tree, but still, she could dip her head and nuzzle wet earth. And the owl can perch above, watching the night around him, sighing Who-ah! at the end of his phrase, waiting for the mouse.

We do hear the owls.

 

 

The tree falls, and there is no one to hear, but it still makes a sound, or at least it makes a compression wave, and the compression wave makes a sound. But if there is no human around, there is no human to hear the sound. So it does not make a mortal sound.

I see the world through a drinking straw. Only the smallest shards of light and life make it through to my eye. It’s easy to see the showy, sparkling differences. It’s easy to see contrast. It’s harder to look at the diminutive weeds, the blackness of a shadow, the trace of rotten fruit, the stillness of a pond and see the orchid, the bear, the squirrel, the owl. It’s harder to look at the evidence and divine the true story. But there’s a payoff if I look, and keep looking: I see.

 

Written July 2007.

I continue to try to encapsulate my observations about the craft of writing in epgrammatic form. I dole these out in coffeespoons, mostly on Twitter and Facebook. Below are those from September, 2012.

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• If you're a memoirist, yet you cannot be honest with yourself, why should anyone believe you?
• Find your lede. If you pose a question at the top, answer it by the end. If you find yourself pursuing other questions as you write, perhaps your lede is wrong.
• Your characters shouldn't act as if they know what's going to happen. The writer is the only one who knows the future.

 O N   S Y N T A X

• Essayists of the short form should read carefully the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town." Each essay is different, all are expertly crafted, all are instructive.
• Formal language has mostly gone out of style; good manners haven't. If you can be gracious using vernacular language, it'll feel more real.
• Dear web producer: you don't need to publish the ### or -30- at the end of the story. Those bits are for your eyes only.
• Buses carry people. Busses carry people's warm feelings. Don't mix them up. 
• Irrespective is a word. Regardless is a word. Irregardless is not a word. Relatedly, supposedly is a word. Probably is a word. Supposably is not a word.

O N   E D I T I N G

• The end will change the beginning. This is why you cannot write a story in only one pass.
• Write today, but publish tomorrow. Editing requires you to fall out of love with your story—and with the person who wrote it.

 O N   W R I T I N G

• Controversial positions will earn you notice, plus a reputation as a crank. Relatedly, your nonfiction writing will attract more attention if it's wrong than if it's right. This is not the kind of attention you want.
• If you're a writer, you can't just tweet and post status updates to Facebook. You have to write stuff, too. 
• Writing is, you know, hard.

 

 

I carry on a nearly continuous internal deliberation on the praxis and poetics of writing. This meta-commentary is mostly prolix and rambling, but it periodically coheres into an aphorism, the gelled distillate of an idea, small enough to be fit into a spoon and swallowed.

Last month I began posting these to my Twitter and Facebook streams, because I was curious what response they might elicit. While there has been little true commentary, there has been evidence of support in the unvoiced enthusiasm that's peculiar to these media. Here are the posts from August. 

O N   R E A D E R S

• Writing is one of the most intimate and beautiful of acts, because it changes another's mind.
• If you're not interested enough in the story to work on it, don't expect a reader to be interested enough in the story to read it.
• When a writer starts wandering off into the rooms of his own head, he sometimes leaves his reader at the foyer, wondering.
• A common mistake is to assume your readers automatically care about your subject. They don't. You must give them something to care about.

O N   S Y N T A X

• Your character might use slang, but you should not. Your syntax must be flawless so the character's voice comes through.
• If you write on behalf of a business, you are the person who gives that business a voice. Tone matters. A lot.
• Let's bury—forever—the word "incent," and throw "incentivize" into the hole, too.
• Let's move beyond "gift" as a transitive verb.
• It's inadvisable to hoe a road. Roads are very hard, so you might hurt yourself. If you really want to hoe something hard, please hoe a row.
• Use contractions. Otherwise, you'll sound pedantic, and you don't want that. "Otherwise, you will sound pedantic, and you do not want that."
• If the score at the end is Grammar 1, Syntax 0, you have failed.

O N   E D I T I N G

• Editors inveigh against redundancy, but sometimes you need to say it twice—and even more simply—to get the point across.
• The writer's hand is visible; the editor's hand is not. When you read good writing, you're likely also reading good editing.
• Many editors aren't. Caveat scriptor.

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• To write, you must first have an idea. Remarkably, this step is often skipped.
• Having been raised by wolves makes a great story, but you'll still need to learn how to write it.
• Chronology doesn't always make the best storytelling. Play with time, mix it up; make your reader stitch the story together for herself.
• Sage quotes by others are all very well, but at some point you must devise a few of your own.
• Tell a story nobody else can tell.
• Be authentic. There isn't anything else.

Writing begets thoughts about writing.

As I work, I reflect on language and narrative, on heroes, readers, and through-action, on the praxis and poetics of writing itself. These thoughts often come in a flash, unbeckoned. Lately, I've been posting one thought per day to my Facebook and Twitter streams, using the #writing hashtag. Here are the posts from July. 

O N   W R I T I N G

• Being smart and being a good writer are two different things. If they weren’t, simply being smart would guarantee success. It does not.
• Journal writing lessens the urge to infuse your public writing with your personal machinations. Focus your journal on yourself, so you can focus your writing on your reader.
• A good presentation is one in which your data is on the overhead, but your ideas are spoken aloud.
• The only writing in which one might legitimately expect to find cliché is that of William Shakespeare.
• Some people have something to say. Some people know how to write. Rarely do these features combine. That’s why we have editors.

 

O N   R E A D E R S

• Write for the reader, not for yourself.
• Of your reader, assume limitless intelligence but no prior knowledge.
• Don’t assume your experience is the same as your reader’s. Don’t resort to clichés. Nobody’s interested in reading clichés.
• When an author talks at the reader, rather than talking through the story, the story bogs down.
• Generate questions in your reader’s mind. If you can keep the reader asking Why?, the reader will keep reading.

 

O N   L A N G U A G E

• Say something profound. Use simple language.
• Rules of thumb, attorneys general. Remember to pluralize the noun, not the adjective.
• In Britain, one has a greybeard, a sceptical advisor. In the US, one has instead a graybeard, a skeptical adviser.
• In the run-up to November, expect a proliferation, in the pages of the New Yorker, of the pretentiously umlaut-decorated “reëlection.”
• Use powerful verbs. Make your prose move.
• The next time you think about ending a sentence with an ellipsis—don’t.

 

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• Position yourself in the narrative. How do you know what you know? Show the reader.
• The best fiction doesn’t seem like reality’s prettier little sister.
• The author does not tell the story. The story tells the story, and transforms itself by its own telling.
• The public’s appetite for private woe-is-me is extremely limited. Use discretion.
• No reader wants a passive hero. Your hero must do something. Now.