Excerpt from
The Deer On A Bicycle
By Patrick F. McManus

   "I was born in an old farmhouse three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho, on August 24, 1933. There is some question about the exact date of my birth, because my father got the attending doctor drunk, and the doctor mistakenly wrote in August 25, instead of August 24, as the date on my birth certificate. That is according to my mother, she and I being the only sober ones in the house at the time. I have been rather pleased with the mistake ever since I first heard about it. Confusion is the natural environment of a humor writer, and it is best to get introduced to it as early as possible."      
                                                                   -from the introduction

   Newton: Pat, what do you mean by "indirection " in a story ?
   I'm sorry you brought that one up, Newt. Let's see. Hmm.  Well, indirection is where you don't write about what you intend to write about but write about something else that in some way reveals what it was you actually wanted to write about. All clear about that?
   You don't go directly at what you want to write about. Humor might almost be defined as an exercise in indirection, because you almost never come out and say what you mean straight on.
   In Ernest Hemingway's On Writing (ed. Larry W. Phillips, Touchstone, 1999), Hem is quoted thusly: "I try always to do the thing by three-cushion shots rather than by words or direct statements. But maybe we must have direct statement too."
   "Be obscure clearly," E.B. White wrote somewhere.
   I somehow drifted into indirection and obscurity by accident. I didn't know what I was doing until someone happened to mention it to me. I'm sure that all my best stories were done with at least one cushion shot.
   In my story "Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing," I wanted to write humorously about a warm relationship between a younger man and an older man. In a broader sense, the story is about how men tend to relate to each other as friends. They do so by indirection. So I wrote the story using indirection to show the indirection men use in expressing affection for each other. They do so by grousing at each other throughout the whole story, which also appears to be a grouse-hunting trip. If that isn't a three-cushion shot, what is?
   Let's say you want to write about your Aunt Agnes as being a really neat lady. You could go straight at Aunt Agnes with your ballpoint pen, but the story probably wouldn't be very interesting.  Maybe instead you could approach Agnes as being a very strict and even harsh disciplinarian, who made your life miserable. That's the way you saw her when you were a child. In the course of your story, however, events and actions reveal bit by bit that your aunt was truly a kind, caring, and amazing woman. 
   That, I think, is what Hemingway meant by "a three-cushion shot" and what E.B. White meant by, "Be obscure clearly." Ultimately, the reader should be able to get the point of it all.
   In his novel The Ambassadors, Henry James uses a rather interesting double point of view. We see a scene through the mind of Lambert Strether, but we also see it objectively off to the side of Strether's head. It is as though the vision of one eye passes through Strether's mind and the vision of the other eye goes past Strether's right ear to the objective scene. Thusly can the reader compare Strether's interpretation of what he sees with the reader's interpretation of what he or she sees from the objective viewpoint. You, the reader, want to shout out, "Are you stupid or what Strether! Don't you see what is happening here?" The obscurity lies in the fact that you cannot take Strether's interpretation of events as being the correct one. Henry James, by the way, is an acquired taste. Somewhere Mark Twain wrote of his novels, "If you lay one down, it's awfully hard to pick it back up again." 
   Obscurity must have a purpose. I once read a creative writing student's novel in which one of the main characters simply disappears. No explanation. Duke is just suddenly gone from the novel without any clues to his disappearance.  "
   Whatever happened to Duke?" I asked the student. "He just suddenly disappears, and he never shows up again." 
   The student didn't miss a beat. "I did that on purpose to create a little mystery," he explained. Yeah, right. You don't create mystery for the sake of mystery. You don't create obscurity for the sake of obscurity. 
   So obscure clearly, and work on that three-cushion shot.