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When I turned 56 last week, I was flooded with various age-related speculations. For instance– and I gave this concept to Weingarten for one of his columns recently (oh the selflessness of editing) — the day I was born, I was closer to the 19th Century than I was to the present day.

Awesome as it is, that is not an actionable fact (unless you consider jaw-dropping an action). But I had another insight that I can act on: There’s a moment in one’s reading life when it might make sense to stop looking for new books to read — an uncertain enterprise that produces as many disappointments as successful outcomes — and instead begin to reread all the books that not only worked for you, but had such a powerful impact that they shaped who you were and what you have become. In other words, make a list of your favorite books of all time, and read them all over again.

My list is long enough that if I stuck to the rereading plan, I’d almost certainly run out the clock before I finished them all. And I’ve actually begun — not with a book from childhood or adolescence or young adulthood, but a series of 13 novels I’d read maybe just five or six years ago. This is the Patrick O’Brian series on the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. I referenced it in a recent post, but I didn’t mention that discovering great passages you only vaguely remembered — or didn’t remember at all — is one of the great perks of rereading.

It is odd, to the point of bizarre, how much of the plot line of the books I have forgotten in just a handful of years. But that makes it even more fun to reread — you can relive even some of the plot suspense you remembered so fondly from the first time around. “I know they get out of this mess, but how?”

It’s not just the re-living that makes this exercise worthwhile. You read differently the second time through. For one thing, time has changed the you that is reading. But even more significantly, freed from trying to follow the overarching outline of the plot, learning the characters, or being distracted by the author’s feints and slights of hand, you have more attention left for the deeper structures of the book, the language itself. The language, the way the characters speak, and the way the author speaks of his characters in a restrained omniscient voice, is what I am most enjoying this second time through. I keep running into small delights — at one point, the author refers to exclamation points as “points of admiration.”  And despite the serious life-death drama, on this second read through, I’m seeing much more clearly the strong, almost slapstick strain of humor that runs through it all — to the point where I’m astonished that I didn’t note it as clearly the first time.

And it’s reassuring: the quality of the writing, the insights, the sheer craft — all are revealed in a clearer light. It’s no mystery why these books lived on in my thoughts for years. It wasn’t an accident that they were the first ones I picked up to reread.

But now I’m already curious about what will happen when I go even further back in my reading history. What would I think of something I absolutely adored when I was 16? Like Catch 22, say. Will it seem juvenile? Impossibly dated? Will I see it as the work of genius that so captivated my teenage self?

I can’t wait to find out.

Yesterday Gene Weingarten won his second Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, which, according to no less an eminence than Joel Achenbach, is the first time anyone has repeated in that category. As Joel recounts, the story behind the winning story began on the morning I read about the unimaginable horror of a local man who went off to work, forgetting his adopted child in the back of his car, strapped into a car seat, on a hot summer day.

I found it so unimaginable, in fact, that I couldn’t stop imagining it. With me, it was more “how could anyone survive that” than “how could anyone do that,” because I knew I would have been capable of that. I know that I can get frighteningly distracted. I know that I can forget stuff. Important stuff. REALLY important stuff.

And as I sat there imagining the unimaginable, I knew there was one person who was even more outrageously forgetful than I was.

Gene Weingarten.

I also knew Weingarten was obsessed, an absolute connoisseur of moral dilemma and metaphysical angst, the unsolvable puzzles that make the human condition so particularly pathetic.

I knew that he would be particularly haunted because of his own fears that he could commit this atrocity himself, and that if the worst came to pass, he would never be able to stop torturing himself for it.

It turned out I hit it on the nose. Years ago, when we were both at the Miami Herald, Gene forgot to drop his toddler daughter at pre-school, and almost went into work, leaving  her in the back of a locked car on a sweltering South Florida day. Just as he was about to close the door on her forever, she said something.

He’d never told anyone, not even his wife.

So when I said, “You were born to write this story,” he didn’t just take it as an assignment, he took it as a sacred mission.

The first thing we decided to do was the one thing we knew would be most difficult of all in a difficult story: try to get the father who had just killed his child by accident to talk to us. Gene called the man’s lawyer, trying to persuade him that his story would be a sincere exploration of how this horrible thing could happen to a good man. The lawyer said: absolutely not. Not now. He said the guy was undergoing treatment. He said he’d let Gene know when or if he could ever contact the man. Weeks passed. Gene learned the man had returned home. He spent days trying to contact the lawyer. The lawyer never responded. So Gene wrote a letter,  a very sympathetic and moving letter, and drove to the man’s house with the idea that he would simply hand-deliver it and walk away. The letter explained why Gene was interested, that he believed it could have happened to him. It said if the man didn’t want to talk, Gene would pledge to leave him alone.

No sooner had he returned to the office than the man’s attorney exploded, threatening all sorts of immoderate actions and launching personal attacks.

That, we figured, was that.

Gene wondered if we should even go ahead with the story.

I said absolutely. That we needed to canvas prior cases, to find people in different phases of recovery, or lack of recovery, from nearly identical tragedies. That the whole point was to get inside the perspective of someone to whom this had happened, to understand it from inside out. There were enough cases out there, unfortunately, that I felt convinced we could find some who would be willing to talk.

And soon enough, Gene hit the jackpot. A woman who had left her infant son in a car several years earlier who, weeping over her dead son’s body, had vowed to take on whatever discomfort, endure the hate and humiliation of public exposure, in order to present herself as a stark warning to other parents. She would strip her soul bare in order to save someone else’s child. Gene was the opportunity to fulfill of her vow.

She became Gene’s guide into this far corner of hell. She revealed herself with fearless, some might even say reckless honesty. Through intelligence, eloquence, and genuine empathy, Gene had won her absolute trust. And that relationship paid an almost miraculous dividend: the woman decided to attend the trial of the father of the most recent victim.  She connected with the man in the halls of the courthouse, reached him with their shared horror, and eventually, she persuaded him that he should talk with Gene, and that doing so would, ultimately, save others from the nightmare that had become his life.

Gene would have his story, and eventually, his second Pulitzer.

There’s a blog I love,  because I am a secret science geek. Ever since Wednesdays in first grade, when they would cancel science hour if I was absent, I have had a passion for talking and reading about science. High school chemistry cured me of any chance that I would actually become a scientist — ie. chemical valences, to wit:

“In chemistry, valence, also known as valency or valency number, is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element. Over the last century, the concept of valence evolved into a range of approaches for describing the chemical bond, including Lewis structures (1916), valence bond theory (1927), molecular orbitals (1928), valence shell electron pair repulsion theory (1958) and all the advanced methods of quantum chemistry.”

I found I liked the BIG PICTURE issues, but not so much the in-the-weeds details. But I still am unaccountably attracted to science discussions aimed at laymen. I’ve been a big fan of the Cosmos and Culture blog at NPR’s site, which is about as sophisticated a discussion as you can get and still hope to attract non-scientists. But sometimes the weeds get a little high, and the question becomes, is it good science, or just bad writing?

Consider this from today’s blog item: “…it is indeed possible for a mind-brain system that is quantum coherent, decohering to classicity and back partially or totally to coherence. Then mind has consequences for the classical matter of the brain by acausal decoherence to classicity, not by acting classically causally on the classical matter of the brain.”

I can’t tell here, because I can’t discern a single atom of meaning. But I have a faith in the language, and I believe someone who deeply understood the issues involved, who was also a seriously good writer, could somehow say whatever the author is trying to say here in a way that even I could understand.

Read The Elegant Universe the first chance you get. It may be the smartest science writing for non-scientists by a major scientist, ever.  Brian Greene pulls it off because, despite the fact that he has deeply esoteric knowledge of one of the most esoteric subjects possible, he also deeply understands where, conceptually, the average reader is coming from. He knows how to point the mind, how to back off and say, “you can’t completely understand this without five years of advanced math study, but . . .” and then come up with a metaphor that will at least convey the sense. But he doesn’t stop there: he’ll also explain the ways in which the metaphor falls short of full conveyance of the idea.

In other words, there’s always another way to skin the cat. Language is a tool for nudging a stranger’s consciousness, herding it along, until finally it arrives at something like enlightenment, or to put it more technically, to “acausal decoherence to classicity.”

Sometimes I read something that strikes me with such force, I wonder if others respond to it with the same intensity, or even anything approaching it. Usually it is a passage that delivers a powerful shock of recognition, as if the author has swept aside a curtain and there, with stark clarity, are your own most intimate reflections. It is for moments like that, even more than the wonderful and historically accurate adventures or the unforgettable relationship between the two main characters, that I so enthusiastically — and perhaps tiresomely — recommend to my friends that they read the Patrick O’Brian novels about British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, circa 1800. To be sure, the series has a cult-ish following, but I fear many more who might fall in love with it would never pick it up, mistaking it for some pot-boiler seafaring romance, or if they do begin reading it, bail out at the first difficulty with the period language and the baffling naval terms.

But those who aren’t put off in advance or in the early going will find serious reward.  Consider this passage from page 350 of my edition of the second in the series, Post Captain (all you really need to know about the situation is that Stephen Maturin has found himself forced by strictures of the contemporary code of honor into the prospect of a profoundly unwanted duel, and he’s borrowed pistols to practice his shooting):

“The evening, as he rode back, was as sweet as an early autumn evening could be, still intensely humid, a royal blue sea on the right hand, pure dunes on the left, and a benign warmth rising from the ground. The mild horse, a good-natured creature, had a comfortable walk; it knew its way, but seemed to be in no hurry to to reach its stable — indeed, it paused from time to time to take leaves from a shrub he could not identify; and Stephen sank into an agreeable languor, almost separated from his body: a pair of eyes, no more, floating above the white road, looking from left to right. ‘There are days — good evening to you, sir’ — a parson went by, walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked — ‘there are days,’ he reflected, ‘when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity — perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However, ‘ he said, guiding the horse left handed into the dunes,’ doing of some kind there must be.’ He slid from the saddle and said to the horse, ‘Now, how can I be sure of your company, my dear?’ The horse gazed at him with glistening intelligent eyes, and brought its ears to bear. ‘Yes, yes, you are an honest fellow, no doubt. But you may not like the bangs; and I may be longer than you choose to wait. Come let me hobble you with this small convenient strap.'”

Shock of recognition? Yes, I rarely ride horses among the dunes or practice my marksmanship with dueling pistols, but that exact sensation of a sudden habitation of the present moment, a dazzling clarity that renders the unremarkable completely extraordinary, has followed me from its first appearance, and sometimes my life seems to unfold insignificantly between those present moments, which contain all the meaning anyone could wish for.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I really, really want to.

I likened the writers of Lost to con men or derivative traders who “are shamelessly abusing their viewers’ trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional investment.”

Today in the Post, in Lisa de Moraes always excellent TV column, we read that Lost co-creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said they aren’t going to even try to tie up all the zillions of lose plot ends. Their excuse: not enough time.

Lisa goes on to say, “If you’re expecting they will nonetheless come through with some kind of post-finale TV special, online chat, tweet — anything! — to answer their rabid fans’ lingering head-scratchers, you need to think again. They have no intention of discussing the show after the finale airs on May 23.”

No, I reckon not. And from now on they are only going to use untraceable cell phones and travel under assumed names.

Watching Heroes the other night, I realized I was suffering from plot whiplash.

Heroes is just one more nail in the coffin of the implied compact between storytellers and their audience. Maybe it all began back with Twin Peaks. It has certainly flowered in Lost. But some time, somewhere, smart script writers figured out how to manipulate the plot system — kind of like the financiers who figured out how to manipulate derivatives to make obscene, and essentially unearned,  fortunes, right before they crashed the entire financial system.

Dramatic and surprising turns in plots have always reliably created an audience reaction. A character suddenly does or reveals something drastically at odds with everything we’ve known about him or her, or a hugely unexpected, unlikely or puzzling event occurs, and the reader/viewer is reliably brought to the edge of his/her seat. The excitement isn’t created by the unexpected twist alone, but because there is a built-in trust that the twist means something, that subsequent events will demonstrate how the anomaly fits convincingly into the larger reality — that in the end, it will all make sense. The bigger the anomaly, the reader/viewer reasonably supposes, the more spectacular and satisfying the revelation that will eventually explain everything.

These junk bond dealers of the literary world are shamelessly abusing that trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional investment. In their stories, absolutely anything can happen, because they know they will never have to explain it all. They’ll just create another distraction downstream, and then another.

All that weird stuff happening on the island, analyzed and parsed by fans ad nausea? Well, the real revelation is, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. The writers are just making it up as they go along.

Anyone who regularly watched Battlestar Galactica knows how expertly the show’s brain trust kept viewers on the edge of their seat. Each twist was a kind of commitment, an IOU for a satisfying explanation. But as the twists accumulated, the indebtedness grew ever larger, and I began to suspect that I was being taken. This whole show was a pyramid scheme. These people had no idea where any of this was going. They had no plan to repay their investors.

And when the margin was called, when the show finally couldn’t defer explanations to another episode or another season, it all crashed down, the proverbial house of cards.  The final episodes were hideous, desperate little things. Far-fetched didn’t cover it. The gaps in logic could only be measured in light years. The show’s fans could only have felt like fools holding fists full of worthless paper.

Trust me on this.

Story Surgeons has been up for about six months now. It’s been a great experience for me so far. I hope my clients have felt the same way. If you’ve used my editing services, I invite you to leave a comment here.

Just had a weird experience with a book editor on a book project I was helping a writer with. To keep it anonymous, I’ll have to relate the story in parable form. Imagine it was a wonderful book about a cat who wanted to have an adventure in the world, then encountered a big, mean, scary dog and, panicked, ran up a tree. Of course, once the cat got in the high branches, he was too scared to come down. The rest of the book is about how the community rallied to find a way to get the cat out of the tree.

The editor receives the manuscript then two months later sends a note, which says: “Looks good, but I’m thinking you should change the cat character into a horse.”

True fable.

An every-day expression offers a fabulous glimpse into how a mindless decision to shorten something turned it from brilliant to drivel. The expression is, “happy as a clam.” There is nothing whatsoever happy about a clam, and yet the phrase has insinuated itself into the language. It’s a mystery, and like all good mysteries, if you solve it, you have a wonderful revelation. The original expression was “happy as a clam at high tide,” which is wonderfully wry and clever. It invites the reader to become a party to the joke, deducing that a clam must indeed be thrilled at high tide. Well, as thrilled as a creature who lives in muck and filters dirty water for a living can be. By comparison, anyway. Because at low tide, as everyone knows, oysters are exposed to humans, who delight in plucking them from the muck, frying them up and slurping them down. Some editor somewhere in the pre-history of editing thought he could save a few words by cutting the “at high tide” from the statement. That editor was stupid as a clam.

When I was editing magazines, everyone always wanted to know, Who is your target demographic? And I always thought: people with lively minds. It seemed to me that any general interest publication’s most crucial audience was people who cared for, were curious about and interested in the world around them. What became very clear over 25 years was that this group cut across any traditional idea of a discrete segment: It could as easily be a janitor as a hedge fund manager, a 13-year-old or an octogenarian, a recent immigrant or a D.A.R. blue blood. More than IQ level, membership only really required an open mind and an outward focus. These people were receptive to new information, even if it ran counter to their expectations. They thought critically, but were willing to be persuaded by facts and reason. They felt things, and delighted in the mysteries of the world. They are people who are truly alive, as opposed to merely living.

And yet, because they don’t fit into an easy slot, they are invisible to many in the media, who in any case wouldn’t know what to do with them. Just as they are difficult to categorize, so is the content which appeals to them. The one thing for certain is: you can’t do it with a formula. What you need to do is present materially which is original, honest, and authentically interesting, created for its own sake, rather than as a tool to manipulate an audience.

So you can see why the janitor-hedge fund manager demographic hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. It’s just so damn hard to exploit.