Fiction!?

I find it kind of funny that within one week I broke my same rule about titling blogs. Somewhere along the line I decided, perhaps for reasons stylistic continuity, that all my titles would essentially be sentences: Initial caps, ending with a period. Of course not actually sentences. Most are hardly fragments. But all the same--initial caps and periods. Yet both this post and another over on the main blog had some other terminal punctuation.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that amuses me. Also, of course, legitimately funny things, don't worry.


Meanwhile, I thought to write this post because I started a short story yesterday. Like actually started. (I was on the phone the night before last with a friend, Louis Jordan, who suggested I go ahead and give it a try. That being as interested as I was in the mechanics of storytelling I might enjoy actually telling stories. I figured he was right--it was worth a shot.)

So at this point there is a draft of sorts. It has, like, a functioning first draft. Doesn't yet have an ending or stuff, and it really needs some refinement, but I'm rather proud. I wasn't sure I'd ever make the leap into fiction. Essays and nonfiction I could do (*cough* I've been blogging for 11 years *cough cough*), poetry I knew I could BS well enough if not actually demonstrate skill at, but fiction always seemed mysterious and not quite possible. Though I still thought about it anyway.

In fact, the main character is one of my older ideas, I guess. I've probably even mentioned him on here somewhere before. Probably. His name is Oliver; likely Oliver Madison--entirely because I wanted at one point in younger times to title a book about him "Whatever's the Matter with Oliver Madison?". Kind of screams "youth fiction," I know, but at the time that was what I actually considering. He was going to get stuck in some weird town full of eccentric characters and have to figure out his shit for whatever reason. It was actually going to veer toward the bleaker end of youth fiction, but yeah. He was also probably going to have a tail; like how people are sometimes born with them? There was even possibly going to be a whole to-do about his mother being forced (Or was she going to in the beginning but forced not to, then forced to? Hard to all the ins and outs sometimes.) to abort him late in the pregnancy but he survives, so from the start he'd be a failed abortion. With a tail? Possibly prehensile? I think at this point we can all agree I was aiming for some kinda Magical Realism stuff, which I think I was. Then he was going to get stranded in a Podunk town after surviving some kind of horribly car accident on a nearby high way. Maybe he and a fellow survivor, a young lady, would have some weird personal discoveries in dealing with tragedy and grief and trauma and stuff? Yeah, I feel like I definitely probably wrote about his whole weird saga on this blog before, but I find it funny enough to mention again now that I'm pursuing the new line of his "destiny".

A friend (Paul T. Klein, to be exact) inadvertently saved him altogether from whatever fate that almost was by suggesting that maybe Oliver had enough going on already with the tail or the girl/car accident route, but not both. Some such simple but sobering suggestion, I'm sure. And with it, I all but rewrote Oliver entirely, though not right away of course. (Paul is really great at these kinds of observations; it's one of the reasons why, when I think to, I love going to him with whatever writing project I'm working on to get some input. Thanks, Paul :) )

All this would have been brewing up somewhere back around four years ago. I don't know why Oliver got put on hold not long after that talk with Paul (besides the obvious reasons: procrastination, distraction, avoidance, etc., with work, life, other stuff, etc.), but I never fully gave up on Oliver. In the last year or so, he began evolving. I internalized his problems, drew from experience: I decided that in fact Oliver would be a recovering alcoholic, though it was almost never going to be explicitly stated or a direct focus. Specifically he's what we might term a "dry drunk": an alcoholic who's merely stopped drinking without really working on all the problems and shit that drove him to drink/that he drank over. (In AA this translates to doing stepwork or going to meetings or fellowshipping and making friends and all that; a dry drunk may do these things somewhat but probably never fully giving it a go, at least not enough to get anything out of it, to grow and change and stuff; it isn't a value judgment or anything, many if not all of us in the Program deal with this kind of plateau at some point. I did it my first 6 months or so, when, although working with a great sponsor and doing stepwork, did not let go of my willfulness and righteousness, so I didn't let the Program in enough to let it help me and stuff. The result was a lot of misery and eventually relapse.)

As I said, this aspect of Oliver will likely never be itself stated or focused on. In fact, pretend you never read it. Ever. Any of this paragraph or the last. Spoilers! Ah, well, I guess I might as well finish explaining the reasoning if the secret's already ruined. Besides, I like explaining it. And let's be honest--who ever actually reads this blog, anyway?

The idea is most of the things afflicting an alcoholic are exaggerations of problems most people face, mixed with bad coping mechanisms and other also very human ingredients. It's a messy, messy but utterly brilliantly human affair, and I find it an irresistible character sketch. Most of the stories I'm thinking of for Oliver are almost like chamber theater or theater in general--an approach I was once told to playwriting was that a play singles out an idea or notion and then tests it, like an experiment, to see if it holds up or fails, to see what happens in different circumstances. Likewise I want to put this dry drunk Oliver in different situations to probe at, most obviously, his issues and insecurities via his reactions in those situations and, indirectly, more broadly reflect on what it is to be human and how we survive. It's all about coping; so I'm thinking I may title the eventual collection simply "Trauma" instead of that assonant title I was considering before. Because we do know what's the matter with Oliver Madison--or, at least, I do. I live it every day, though not at all as hopelessly or roughly as he does.

In fact, amusingly despite having at least two other stories sketched out in my mind for him, the story I started writing yesterday is entirely new, entirely based on current events in my life. Like flagrantly and transparently so, at least for now. I may change the circumstances but for now it's a nearly literal transliteration of what's happening in my life: Oliver has come to visit a somewhat friend, Rick, who's recovering from testicular cancer; the guy has been living with his parents but now, coincidentally, both Rick and his parents are moving to new (separate) homes; and with all of this going on Rick feels his life has been pointless. Despite the obvious correlation to my personal life's circumstances, I don't actually see myself as Rick. Rick and his insecurities are at best drawn from things I've wondered about what's going (feeling guilty about not helping Mom pack or amazed that I'm not in worse, more crippling pain) but either dismissed, laughed off, or put in perspective, but Rick takes them seriously, takes them much farther into the neurotic deep end.

All of this developed as I wrote, to be honest. By the end of my work yesterday, we have Oliver having to deal with Rick's emotional burden (all but outright histrionic, too), and frankly that's not one of Oliver's strengths--dealing with feelings head on, especially other people's. And also Rick's angst hits home: Oliver worries, too, about the pointlessness of his life. Although he expresses it differently and would rather avoid it than impose it on some other person or deal with it on his own, he's stuck there out of the social obligation of visiting a sick friend. And eventually he snaps at Rick (in what I hope will be, essentially, the meaty important take-away bit of the story).

I'm glossing over a lot here, I know. There's bits I want to blog about today and there's bits I know I don't have time to and there's bits I haven't processed enough or can't remember enough to. But one thing I do want to mention is some of the more mechanical aspects of writing this draft yesterday; things I noticed I care about or want to work on and develop, both within this story and more broadly for my style.

One is absorbing as best I can the strengths of Alice Munro, whom I've been reading lately. She's very good at efficient and subtle character statements; specifically means by which she reveals characters' inner lives through an observation the character makes, but as often it's how the character observes and phrases it as what they're expressing directly. It's utterly brilliant and entirely thrilling for me as a reader who cares about writing, and also just anyway cuz it's brilliant as fuck.

So beside needing to go back and refine the Rick character, as he really changed in some ways over the course of the drafting process, I want to refine Oliver's reactions and align what they reveal to us about him.

In terms of Rick, in some ways from the start he has an almost transparently Freudian way of projecting his guilt and stuff, but later it's something else. I need to figure out what that is--what he wants--at least enough to string it up through the whole of the story so that it's not liking having all the lights on one side of the Christmas tree but distributed evenly and consistently through out. As I said he's worried about his life feeling pointless; I want to tie that in, if I need, to the guilt he feels at the beginning for not helping his mom with the move more. Rick is convinced his mother resents him for not helping though she's made no such mention or indication. He thinks it's because he's not as helpless and bedridden as he expects he should be and that she must think he's just lazy or faking. This tranforms somewhere into an obsession with what he likens to "cause and effect", that his invalid status doesn't match up with the reality that should entail it; he doesn't feel like he's actually as helpless as he's expected to behave. Of course part of Rick's problem is that instead of offering to help in whatever way he is capable of, he just feels bad about it and indulges his moping, and therefore loafing, even more. For Rick this perfectly encapsulates the last several years of living with his parents, and thus feeling shitty and pointless. That he can't explain why he accomplished nothing, so the nothing feels extra pointless.

Sorry, that was all basically just my thinking out loud, outlining Rick's issue to pinpoint it. Because as I said, the transition in the story I represented above was actually a transformation in my mind as I wrote; as I revise I'd like to keep the big picture in mind so I can tweak accordingly. Right? Right.

I also need, likely at some later draft, to figure out how much of these circumstances are going to stay identical to reality or need/want altering. But that can come as needed, whence came my saying "later drafter". But also, back to consistency and such, I need to figure out what kind of character/person Rick is. I seem to recall his banter with Oliver early on is almost witty, at Oliver's level, but later I kind of wanted him to be a histrionic, insufferable sod, not quite self-aware enough to save himself from his own pretensions and revelations and shit. So do I need to dumb him down? recast the opening conversations entirely? These and other questions will want both revisiting those early parts of the draft in particular and reflections on Rick as a character in general, so I don't need to worry too, too much just yet.

As for Oliver, part of the tricky part is keeping in mind his broader story and character. I think I capture his snarky assholishness and self-centeredness fairly well. (For example, he feels bad after yelling at Rick near the end, feeling that as useless and annoying as Rick is he didn't deserve it, but refrains from apologizing because it might entangle him into Rick's bullshit all over again and at last he's got the best opportunity yet to escape the unbearably awkward situation whole thing.) Oliver is a jerk but he isn't a bad person, exactly. It's not that he doesn't (entirely) care, it's just that he's more concerned with his own extreme discomfort and such, so much that he's not even aware of other people's problems. [I think that's where I was going with that thought; I got distracted. {on a side note, I'm glad I've decided to separate this blog from my main one; i find these sorts of reflections invaluable and I'm sure there are a few others who would enjoy them, at least for skimming or research if i actually do become someone people research and write about, but the general masses would probably be extremely frustrated by now.}]

Other issues arise as well. For example, in trying to tell Rick to be grateful, Oliver says "if I tried to pull this shit, my mom would have kicked me to the curb years ago!". Yet, in another story I have sketched he has been doing just that--living with his parents while in a rough patch. Perhaps that is more of a month-long interim style "visit" than a multi-year long squat, but perhaps not--one of the things I'd hoped in that story was he'd be angry with himself for living with his parents. (Clearly I must have some awful resentment against myself for this--if I have two different characters in two different stories (out of a possible three planned) fixating ruefully on living with their parents and shit. Or maybe it's just a nugget of commentary I haven't found an adequate home for.) So there's some continuity issues like that I may want to look at later, but that's definitely a "later" problem.

I'm not as worried about this problem as I suspect revising will balance and resolve it, but I'm concerned that Oliver isn't really in the story much. I feel, and this may be mistaken hindsight, his own reflections comprise barely a quarter of the draft. The majority of it is the dialogue between Oliver and Rick though (it's a vignette afterall), but I cna't help feeling it could be better or at least more purposely (subtly, of course) distributed? As I said, I want to work on those indirect character reveals that Munro is so good at (of course I do realize she's been writing probably twice as long as I've even been alive, she's had plenty of time to hone her craft whereas I've hardly begun), and I suspect the subtlety could be undermined by lumping all the non-dialogue together overly much. There were some good moments, I thought, where I managed to have Oliver slip some thought comment between things Rick was saying or unsaid things between what he was saying himself, but I'd like more of that or at least refine that, too.

One last thing: One of the big breakthroughs I had was to put it in first person. I think it was a hold up for me with Oliver and what I was trying to work on with subtlety and stuff to write Oliver's situation in third person all the time and not flagrantly defy "show don't tell" and such conventions. It really was holding me up. So at least this story is in first person. I can see how working on making third person function would also help develop these subtlenesses and stuff, but for now I also want to work on confidence with fiction and stuff. Obviously I'm trying to wrap up and this housekeeping is messier than the loose ends i'm trying to pull together, lololol. See?