Teenage Daughter Adds A New Dimension

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

The Proud Dad

By Leonard Bishop

     I have a teenage daughter and we are in a generation gap.

At 16 she has outgrown rainbow stickers and unicorns and is obsessed on furs and Ferraris.  She is everywhere in the house, all at once, at the very time you want her someplace else.

“Kiersten, let me into the bathroom, I have cramps.”

Her voice lilts through the bolted door, “Sorry, Dad, I’m doing my eyes.”

I stagger upstairs.  She is in that bathroom, too.

Then, unexpectedly she will reach out and hug me and coo, “Dad, are you having a good day?”  Without her, an exceptional love would be absent in my life.  My time would be without luster.

I am a writer and I have no understanding of her.  She is a phenomenon, an outer-spacey, a becoming woman, a holding-on child.  She adores her mother and is angry for not being exactly like her.  She admires her father and estimates him as a loveable grouch.  Yesterday, in a steak joint, she became wistful, dreamy.  She used a napkin to write an advertisement.

“Wanted: one guy, good looking, with sports car. Christian. Likes dancing, deep talk about clothes.  Wears Nikes, cruises uptown, enjoys flirting but is faithful.  Muscular but not gross.  Intelligent.  Sensitive.  Compassionate.  Not a sexist.  Wants children.  Hurry, I’m here.”

She crumpled the napkin and shrugged.  “They don’t make guys that way any more.”

She is 16 and I do not envy her.  If they make young men, now, as they did in my day, I would guard her with a loaded shotgun.  “Kiersten, Kiersten, it takes a long time for love to happen suddenly,” I want to tell her.  “You have an endless array of tomorrows.  You should not hurry a dream.  You must caress it.  You should not shout to love “I am here.”  You must whisper lovingly, “I grow while I wait, I increase while I hope.  I will give you all of myself and you will not want more.”

Sixteen years old and sexy as a rose.  Blonde and tall and moulded syrup in a bathing suit.  Her peer group demands that she ‘put something out’ but she is adamant for her virtue.  She won’t beer up or party.  She shuns pot, and hard drugs terrify her.  She does her homework and reads Dr. Seuss books to her little brother.

At home she eats like a starving wrestler –at a party she’s all manners and ree-feen-ment.  I pass her room and she stands at the window watching a remote star.  Alone.  Forlorn.  A melodic sigh, licking a tear leaked onto her lips. “Hold out, Kiersten,” I want to say.  “You will meet the young man you desire and he will hold you close and murmur,  But to see her was to love her/Love but her, and love forever.”

     A pinch of talent for anything becomes an absolutely unchangeable career.  At 11 it was ballet until exertion made her sweat.  As a concert pianist she would travel throughout Europe –then canceled her tour because she would not cut her fingernails.  At 14 she would become a great actress, then realized her braces would distress the hero during a kiss.

She was a cheerleader at 15 and loved the pompoms and short skirts and cavorting.  She’s 16 now and wants to be a Child Psychologist.  I have hidden my books on werewolf-ism.

She hates other girls who might be lovelier and the guy another girl has is the guy she wants.  She protests, “I don’t want a man to love me for my body,” while she primps and arranges her clothes to emphasize her contours.  “I want him to love me for my mind,” then is annoyed when her mother starts the fireplace with the comics.

She is uncontrollable energy flung about the house like a riveting machine gone mad.  Then she is a doldrum laying on the couch in utter paralysis.  She delves into profound meaning with intense curiosity.  “Dad, what are guys really like?”  She is frivolous, a clutter of titters and giggles.  “I’m so happy today.”  Four minutes later she is huddled in a corner –a pouting Greek tragedy.  “Why must I wear glasses?”  She is too old to spank for her infractions and she is too clever to punish.  She’ll point at me and shout, “Don’t you dare touch me.  I’ll have you booked for child abuse.”

A writer without a teenage daughter is missing a dimension of wonder.  The mysteries of life are not held in the outer reaches of unexplored space.  They are locked in Kiersten –they are shared with her girlfriends.  Teenage daughters cannot be understood through insight or understanding.  You can only survive them through unqualified acceptance.  The only bridge across the generation gap is love.

(first published September 2, 1984 The Manhattan Mercury)

© Leonard Bishop

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Outlines: Mapquest for novelists, or soul-killing, oxygen-sucking waste of time?

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

Outlines: Mapquest for novelists, or soul-killing, oxygen-sucking waste of time?.

(A great glimpse into how Leonard Bishop keeps affecting the lives of writers! )

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Writers, Farmers: Two of a Kind

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

  By Leonard Bishop

     I see the splendor of wheat fields sprawled throughout Kansas and I am stunned with wonder. I drive along the flat roads between cities and the green crops flow like an ocean beginning to fill the world.

Toward the horizon I see the tops of corn touch the crystal sky and they seem to be hanging down from heaven.  I think: I cannot farm.  I have a black thumb and could not raise comely weeds.  How can I identify with all this splendor?  How can I believe that I am in kinship with the family farmer so I can believe my writing is also vital to others?

Our similarity is in our similar aloneness: in our dream.

We work in hope and survive through the illusion that this hope will become real.  The family farmer uses the mystery of a seed: the writer uses the seed of an idea.  The farmer plants in an empty earth: the writer plants on the blank page.  Farmers struggle with the time of growth and the seasons.  Writers struggle with time and topicality.

We know what we want to produce and are always uncertain of what will arise.

Farmers seem to be realists but they depend upon the unpredictability of the climate.  Writers appear to be laboring in the abstract of imagination to create a saleable reality.  I doubt if farmers can adequately explain why their lives are farming.  I have never known any writers who can rationally reveal why they became and remain writers.  Both can only declare,  “It is what I do!”

If we work only for the money our efforts will bring, we are misguided fools.  Few farmers or writers ever “make it big.”

Family farmers aren’t the ones with a $100,000 air conditioned stereo and television equipped combine.  Often they are using the same outdated equipment used by their ancestors.  They do not always own the land they plow, and they are always in debt.  Serious writers do not use costly word processors, have no splendiforously decorated studios, no masseurs to ease their aching shoulders.  Their most expensive item is an old electric typewriter.  Often, they spend two non-paying years to finish a novel and do not know if it will bring in any income.

Farmers can adapt all the modern techniques for increasing and improving their crops –writers can practice all the advancements of their craft –but all must agonize in their souls while waiting to realize what they have produced.

The farmer is controlled by the seasons.  The writer is manipulated by a literary agent or publisher.  The farmer brings in the crop and it is taken away –for a price –and part of it is used and some part is stored, misused or destroyed.

The writer completes a novel and it is taken away –for a price –and the depths that were torn from the heart are mangled by an indifferent editor or hack publisher.  We are steadfast in commitment, strong in purpose, prayerful in expectation, and always helpless when the world takes over what we do.

Societies of people enter stores and markets to purchase our production.  Food for the body, food for the mind.  The consumer does not consider that men and women –farmers and writers –bring these creations into fruition.  They buy bread, not wheat.  They buy books, not a writer’s heart.  They use the food and soon are ready for more.  They do not paste the bread wrapping into an album or recall last week’s radish.  They read a novel and soon are interested in another.  Last week’s novel is no longer an important experience in their lives.

Whose work is more inspiring, more beneficial to humanity?  Nobility or worth is not the question.  To the writer all other ways of life are suppressive and grim.  To the farmer there is no other life comparable to this one.

I see a great field of corn and I praise God for these resources and then feel astonishment about the farmer.

I think: this is no different from the birth of a people, or a longed-for-child.  A seed is planted and the womb of earth nurtures its growth through the season.  It is cultivated, cleansed, hovered over with loving expectation.  It is guarded against the ravages of disease, the murder of neglect.  Until it is full grown and ready to be taken from its source –the belly of the land.  All of life comes from the earth.  It is an astonishing recognition.

I would not be a farmer.  I know farmers who would retch at the thought of becoming writers.  How can we be so obviously different while being so symbolically similar?  It is not logical.  Perhaps it is enough to know that civilization needs us.

(first published August 26, 1984 The Manhattan Mercury)

© Leonard Bishop

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Even A Writer Needs To Eat

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

By Leonard Bishop

Our country’s economy is variable, eccentric.  This excess may suddenly recess, then collapse.

I am not secure in Kansas.  During a depression a writer is as necessary as armpit boils.  Where would I find work to support my family?  While I’ve worked at a multitude of  trades and professions, I never specialized.  Who would employ me in Kansas?

When I was nine years old I saved a whorehouse madam’s frilly poodle from being squashed by a truck.  She gave me work bringing towels and drinks to the rooms.  I earned tips because I never peeked and would not remember faces or names.  I understand that the whorehouses in this area have been shut down.  An avenue of employment has been dead-ended for me.

In Detroit I worked in a pool room racking balls.  You had to be tough, dumb, and mute.  An ill-timed sneeze could get you beaten.  You couldn’t tip off the regulars when they were being hustled.  You brought the toughies drinks, lit their cigarettes, brushed the table after every game.  The establishments I’ve visited in Kansas have miniature tables that gobble quarters.  A one-armed paraplegic with earthquake shakes could clear twenty tables in a run.  The cowboys and farmers slop beer on the surface and roar in triumph when they finally sink a ball.  They have vitality, not skill.  My disrespect would get me fired or killed.

In Main, I painted flag poles.  I sat on a small platform attached to pull-rigging.  I swayed and lurched and the thick pole became a fishing rod bending in the hard wind.  I prayed more than I painted.  Is there steady work for a former flagpole painter in Kansas?

I was a draftsman during World War II.  I was the worst draftsman ever given a rating.  I haven’t worked at it since, and old age and watery eyesight hasn’t increased my skill.  In Long Island I sold baby pictures, door-to-door.  There was a rapist terrifying the area.  He always wore a camera around his neck.  Women would not allow me into their homes.  Now, I’m bigger and meaner looking.  Women in Herington cross the street when they see me.  I would never be able to sell them baby pictures.  When I was a bum ‘on the road’ I picked peaches in Florida.  Peaches are not a prevailing crop in Kansas.  Is my greatest expectation in Kansas to apply for food stamps?

I went the ‘carnie-route’ and worked the game concessions and sometimes spieled the coochie shows.  The G-string girlies wiggled and jiggled and bumped their wares and I barked, “Hurry, hurry, watch’m while they’re hot –you can look but you can’t take them home.”  The carnivals in Kansas have Girl Scout programs, the Future Farmers of America being judged for the best cows, and contests for angel cake.  No employment there.  Someone help me, I’m getting worried.

I worked for a private detective in San Francisco.  I followed wives engaged in infidelity and husbands who philandered.  I was big, but slinky.  I was never spotted tailing anyone.  I could hide behind parked trucks, in shop doorways, crouch beside newspaper stands.  Who would hire me, in Herington, to sneak after someone?  Where could I hide?  Everyone knows me.  Everyone knows everyone.  Everyone knows what everyone is doing.  Besides, my wife assures me that such lewd dilly-dallying does not go on in her beloved town.  Too bad.  A juicy scandal always activates lazy thyroid glands.  I’m feeling down-and-out already.

I’ve taught ‘professional writing’ at some of the largest and most important universities in the nation.  Students have gotten published after attending my classes.  Several times I tried to teach in Kansas.  I sat in rooms as large as phone booths, as dank as morgues.  I waited and waited and waited.  I heard the skitter of mice, the lisp of caterpillars.  Everybody wants to be a writer but nobody wants to write.  Scratch another source of income in Kansas.

I must finish the novel I’m writing.  Though I still have some money in the bank, the jittery economy frightens me.  Reagan might be re-elected –or Mondale might become president.  When two mediocrities run, you always lose money, no matter who wins.  Oh well, I’ll bring a book along to read while standing on the welfare line.

(first published August 19, 1984 The Manhattan Mercury)

©Leonard Bishop

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Write Like a Painter!

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

From Leonard Bishop, Author of Dare To Be A Great Writer

Great writers…as they write, books get shorter, but the plot isn’t shorter.  Like a painter, full detail is brought to the minimum.  Paint that which is exact.  (4/13/95)

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

By Leonard Bishop

      Have I been cursed by moving to Kansas –or blessed?

Last year I had decided to stop writing “artistic” novels that penetrate the core of life and peel naked the soul; I wanted to become wealthy.

I would write a commercial novel about the old West.  A generational novel, a panoramic saga a la Michener and Clavell.  I would have power-thrusts, cattle lords, railroad barons, and a senator with an old-world Mafioso connection.

And then I went to a cattle auction in Salina and the horror of the experience still makes me retch.

The nine hours I spent there was like living inside a hobo’s soiled underwear.  I went home and pulled out every hair from my nostrils, but the stench is still in my nose.  I have already made arrangements with a mortician to bury me anywhere in the world, as long as the cemetery is 500 miles from a cattle auction.  I took my five year old son, Luke, with me.  The scars have not yet appeared.  I am waiting for him to wake up screaming, then rush into our bedroom covered with ticks, eerie drool, and a horn poked up from his forehead.

I confess to an admiration and awe for the men and women who work with cattle.  They have more patience, courage and character than I will ever acquire.  In order to provide the public with meat loaf and chops, they make great sacrifices.

My purpose in attending the cattle auction was research.  We drove with a farmer who wanted to sell about 30 heifers.  The beasts were in the rear of a long trailer.  He backed it into a platform and asked if I would help him open the trailer gates.  I thought he looked arrogant in his high cowboy boots.

I began to smell the animals.  I opened my side of the gate and I was suddenly ankle deep in a tide of excrement.  I wanted to shriek with discomfort but had to grab my son to keep him from drowning.  Even as the farmer prodded the cattle to the pens, it was coming out of them.  I wanted to steal his high cowboy boots.

We went inside an auditorium-like structure and the stink was an axe-head whamming my lungs.  I held my son’s nose until he almost suffocated.  There were hundreds of men and women in jeans, boots and hats, chatting as though they did not know they were sitting in the rectum of hell.  Brown bugs, fleas, mosquitoes and probably tse-tse flies attacked us.  Afraid of seeming unheroic to my son, I did not bolt. The farmer said, “How’s ‘bout some burgers an’ fries?”  I almost heaved my breakfast onto his bright plaid shirt.

I thought of my money-making commercial novel:  In 1869 three brothers migrate from Czechoslovakia.  They separate and agree to meet in Wichita.  One rides the railroad, another a wagon train, another signs up for a cattle drive.

I sat and watched them bring out the cattle to be auctioned.  Whatever evacuative orifices God had provided them with, were busy.  They bumped, shoved, jumped on and splattered each other.  Then the auctioneer began his babble.  His voice clattered like a ton of beer cans avalanching through a steel tunnel.  The farmer beside me understood every word.  My son asked, “What’d he say, Dad?”  I muttered, “He was just clearing his throat.”  My commercial novel began to drain from my ambitions.

Two fearless men stood among the beasts and flailed them with whips.  Then I began thinking the people had suddenly become agitated lunatics.  They blinked, crossed legs, jiggled feet, touched eyebrows, nodded, winked, shrugged, rubbed their ears, wiggled their fingers, patted bellies, tapped hat brims, picked their teeth.  Believing they might be contagious, I wanted to grab Luke and run.  The farmer chewed his ninth hamburger and whispered, “Settle down –they’re jest bidding.”  I sat, scratching my flea bites and soothing my son by reciting the poetry of John Donne and passages from Aristotle.  But in my soul I was grieving.

I wanted wealth, but not desperately enough to be around cattle.  I thought of one chapter I would have to write in my commercial novel.  The setting was a pig farm.  I almost wept.  I was fallen before I was launched.  I would have to continue writing serious novels and earn less money.  Am I cursed, I wonder –or blessed?  Kansas and its cattle are forcing me to keep my literary integrity.

(first published August 5, 1984 The Manhattan Mercury)

©Leonard Bishop

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Writing Hint: Use Adventure!

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

From Leonard Bishop, Author of Dare To Be A Great Writer

To keep a novel alive, use adventure.  Have a highly credible character that performs highly incredible things.  (8/26/98)

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When You Know You’ve Finally Made It

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

 By Leonard Bishop, Author of Dare To Be A Great Writer

      I dislike “name droppers” unless it’s my name they’re dropping.  Early in my career as a writer I achieved that status.

Everyone, in any profession, wants his/her name to become so well known that the use of their name adds significance and glamour to the conversation.  An insurance salesman wants his ‘name’ to represent such selling power that other salespeople will drop it: “I was having a drink with Mark Rogers –Markie-boy was the one who sold President Reagan a $4-million fire policy to cover his warehouse of jelly beans, you know…”

Having been a writer for about 30 years brings you into contact with famous people.  I avoid using their names.  It is either pushy, or it diminishes the value of my name.  Only when my refusal to lie forces me to admit that I know such people will I drop a famous name.  “Do you know James Michener?” someone will ask me.  I am compelled to answer, “Yes.  I used to play volleyball with him.  I bumbled about like a tank –he pranced like a gazelle.  I always lost.”

“What about William Faulkner?”

“The last time I met Bill he had so much booze in him he should have been labeled.”

I could “drop names” all day long.  Let me blurt out a few.

Erskine Caldwell once sneered at me in an elevator, “Put out that damn cigarette and take a bath.”  The last time I saw Joseph Heller he tried to recall that we had once been  friends.  I lost 10,000 francs because of Frank Yerby.  He insisted that the casino operators in Monaco open up the crap tables so I could play.  At a party given for the ‘artists’ collected by Boston University, Roddy MacDowell snubbed me because my unshined shoes were unlaced.  One night Norman Mailer asked me to step outside and fight.  “Just for the hell of it.”  He was seven inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter.  I told him I was afraid he might hurt me and I had diarrhea.  We thumb wrestled instead.

One afternoon at the United Nations building I was talking to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.  He was a tall man.  He leaned over to me and whispered, “Leonard, you are disgracing America.  You look like a bum.  Get yourself shaved.”  At a party in the suburbs of Paris the artist Maurice Utrillo chased me around the room, trying to kill me.  The color combination of my clothes was clashy.

Marc Chagall demanded that I leave his patio in Venice because my heavy breathing disturbed his chess game.  Phil Silvers tried to tell me how to write a book and I tried to tell him how to tell a joke.  We did not get along at all.  One night at the Friars Club in New York, I was in the toilet with the singer Tony Martin.  We stood at the urinals, chatting.  It was most pleasant.

“Dropping” the names of these people means little to me.  It is my name I want dropped.  When it finally happened, I was over whelmed.  I had written two moderate best sellers, but only after my third novel was my name used to impress someone.

I received a telephone call from George Mandel  (he had only published one novel at the time)  telling me he had to attend an important publishers party.  All the baby sitters he and his wife used were busy.  Would I come to his apartment and “fill in” for a couple of hours?  “You’ll get a dollar an hour, and the refrigerator is yours.”  I agreed to help him out.

When he returned he was laughing.  He mentioned some of the writers who were at the party.  While he was fixing himself a drink, he overheard someone ask Mario Puzo if he knew that “crude but forceful writer Leonard Bishop.”  Puzo picked the cigar from his mouth, scratched his large stomach and nodded, “Oh, sure I know Bishop.  He’s George Mandel’s babysitter.”

I knew from that time on that my name would become a household word.

(first published July 15, 1984 The Manhattan Mercury)

©by Leonard Bishop

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Writer’s Hint: Keeping the Readers Interested

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

From Leonard Bishop, Author of Dare To Be a Great Writer

A reader’s interest is captured by what you tell them, not by what you promise to tell them.  (11/5/98)

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Writer’s Hint: How to Survive While Waiting to be A Professional Writer

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Multiple Viewpoints

From Leonard Bishop, Author of Dare to Be a Great Writer

If you feel like a failure, go back into your past and find a time of accomplishment for something you once thought impossible.

Change the “inner editor”  (Instead of telling yourself, “This is terrible!”, cheer yourself with, “This is terrific! More! More!” for something you’ve done well.)

Never accept rejection and believe what is written on the manuscript.

You need desperation (as inspiration.)

11/5/98

©by Leonard Bishop

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