Pondering anew.

As I mentioned in my other post, the one about "Simon's Love Life," as we're calling it, that I'd made some progress on "Ponder." The poor thing has been so neglected, but I do still care for it. It's just ... it's a difficult story, it seems. So much world building, plus having to balance several things at once. Developing multiple characters. All that world building (again). It's a lot for a new writer, I've rationalized, so hitting those snags isn't all that surprising.

But the two little breakthroughs. Neither is entirely paradigm shifting, but in their way, each has helped me progress a little on the difficulties that held me up. Also, I can't remember how much I've shared about the story (apparently not much because "Ponder" wasn't even a tag I'd used on a blog post here before), so this may all be totally unclear. But I'll just proceed to share anyway because I'm too lazy to look it up!

First, one of the points of "tension" (assuming I really go that direction—having, you know, tension in the story) is that they're waiting for a resupply to get them through the next month. But it's never going to come. They talk about what they need all the time (or at least several times), but it isn't going to come. So this is the minor "causal black hole," but it's a really important one given it's what dooms them and seals the story's unhappy ending.

Basically, the problem was: Why didn't the resupply come with the ponderswap? What I came up with was that the ponder returning to Earth takes a list of all the supplies they need, then in 2-3 weeks, the resupply comes, and all is marvelous. The breakthrough was realizing the timeline: The ponder returns to Earth after it's been destroyed, so no resupply can be mounted because it's gone. Duh.

This doesn't change much, I suppose; it was just realizing something basic about the world I'd been building that was already built in. But it affects how I approach this problem and plan and execute in the course of the story, so that's a big deal.

The second thing is a bit trickier. In the original plannings, I was going to have someone remark that they pitied Oscar's wife for having to put up with an asshole like him; I can't remember exactly how I planned it in my notes, but he was basically going to smile knowingly and say something evasive. Later, when they're all watching the world getting destroyed, he was going to fall to his knees and sob "My husband...", thus revealing his gayness. I think the idea was—whether I quite realized it or not—to conflate the reader's recognition of his personal tragedy and loss with the discovery that he's actually gay and that the surprise of the latter would combine with the sympathy of the former to synergistically create a stronger response in the reader...? Maybe?

There are a couple of problems with this, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with any of them. Roughly 2.5ish, to be precise.

1. One is an ethical sort of problem(s) that my boyfriend Anthony introduced me to. That is, I hadn't heard of it/them until he mentioned them, not that he caused them in our relationship. (Important distinction!)
1. Queerbaiting: I'm not entirely sure this would have qualified as queerbaiting, but as I reflected on it the other day, it felt uncomfortably close to it. And I didn't like that. Usually, it involves a homo relationship that's implied but not depicted. Oscar's relationship with his husband isn't directly in the story and it isn't, really, hinted at either, but it seemed similarly dishonest anyway. Also, using gayness as a gotcha? Hm...
2. Fridging: Also not entirely sure this counts, but it was uncomfortably close. With fridging, a character (usually a woman) is killed, and her death isn't sad in itself—as the tragic end of a whole, valuable human being's life—but as a means to progress the story/motivations of the main character (usually a man). What felt uncomfortably close was that Oscar's husband was basically gonna get name dropped as he was getting killed just to advance Oscar's personal tragedy. Their relationship would have no other impact on or development within the story.
2. The other problem is that I'm not entirely sure keeping his husband a secret is in character for Oscar. While, yes, he's a consummate asshole and troll, I'm not sure a) that, in that future time when things are (hopefully) more open, he'd have the motivation to hide it and b) that, troll that he is, Oscar would want to be coy, even to fuck with everyone.

I'm still not sure to what extent his marriage will be developed in the story, if at all, but in reflecting on those problems, I happened to figure out a better, more honest and ethical way of "using" Oscar's husband for the purposes of the story. First of all, no more "Gotcha!"; that should go without saying, I think. Second of all, rather than off handedly or simply conveying his tragedy, his bringing up his husband could bring home the overall tragedy of the story—everyone's tragedy—that everything and everyone they've loved have been gone and dead for a month—in one simple gesture:

"Oscar! Calm the fuck down!"

"I will not calm down—my husband is down there!"

"...was down there," Kimberly corrected quietly. "Was."

I think this is better? At several/a couple points during the story, Kimberly has reminded the other characters that, although the ponder is broadcasting in "real time," it's a month behind the actual events, and she's done so in exactly this way—simply correcting their tenses. But this time, it introduces the major causal black hole: That everything they've been doing and discussing over the course of the story has no meaning because humanity and their home have been been callously erased from the universe.

Anyway, I'm not sure when I'll get back to "Ponder." I still find it kind of intimidating, frankly, and I'm really focused on "Simon," so it may be a while yet. Still, I'm pretty happy with these bits of progress.

Some promise and its problems.

So it's been a while, hasn't it? I hit some major snags with developing "Ponder," so I set it aside . . . And kind of didn't go back to it? Oops.

Well, I made some progress there, actually, but what got me back in the game was a new story that's totally different. As it happens. So we'll get back to "Ponder" in another post.

Before I get ahead of myself, though, I want to make a shout out to my boyfriend, Anthony. I'd proposed doing a thing: Every Sunday, we'd go to Starbucks or what have you and write. See, he's a writer, too. I wanted him to work on his novel(s), and I wanted me to work on my blogs. And eventually, he took me up on it! I honestly probably wouldn't have gotten back into writing without that, so thanks!

Anyway, the night before our second such write up, I was on the train thinking about a friend of mine. We'd talked a few times after a long break. On one occasion, she mentioned some health problems but didn't specify anything; on another, she mentioned seeing someone she was digging; and so on.
As I rode the train home after working a double at the restaurant, it occurred to me: What if she's dying?? Then it occurred to me: Why would she be dating someone if she were dying? Weird thoughts.

But then I wondered: What would it be like (newly) dating someone who was dying? And, further: What if he were really messed up? Like, Munchausen by proxy messed up, but maybe not quite that bad. Or at least different.

So I concocted a story concept from that: A parasitic type of guy dating a girl who's dying, but he's doing it for the attention and sympathy usually given to people caring for the ill or dying or whatever. I've decided to call it, at least for now, "Simon's Love Life" because his love life is obviously fucked up. And his name is Simon.

So anyway, I threw together some notes on the train—interspersings of snippets and thoughts and so forth. When Anthony and I met up the next day, I then divvied them up into a SNIPPETS doc and a NOTES doc and then supplemented those with an OUTLINE doc. You probably don't care about my so-called method, but given this is, practically speaking, my first short story, any way forward has been a big deal for me. So I care!

Anyway, I got a little stuck from there. I needed something to happen, as often is the case in stories, but I wasn't sure what. The guy couldn't just dither on creepily for 10 pages then end. I mean, of course he could, but I wanted something more. Then it dawned on me.

***SPOILER***
What if she kicks him out of the hospital room when she's actually about to die? But—then!—what if he creeps on the parents after she's gone? Couldn't get what he wanted from her, but what about her grieving parents?

So the whole story needs to build to that, I've decided. That said, actually getting it to do that is the tough part. Remember, I'm pretty new and clumsy with this. But yeah. Progress!

I've now finished a (very) rough draft, and I hate it. But I'm told that's kind of how it goes. The most persistent problem in my mind is, of course, the roughhewn storytelling itself. But also, Simon isn't really creepy. He's more sappy, repetitive, monovocal, and maybe just annoying. Furthermore, and this is separate from the narrative structure/activity per se, there is a lot of awkwardness, and it's frustrating; I couldn't quite pull off some of what I wanted, and I don't think it's something that tweaks and light revision will change.
Here's what I've done so far and what I plan to do:

• I ended up writing out each of the snippets—each of the scenes, really—and now just have to paste them in the order of the outline.
• I think the next step will be to read through and draw up a new outline; the current one has prospective sketches of the intended purpose or purposes for each scene, but they're rough and ill defined and I'm not sure I fulfilled them, which is fine. It was a rough outline for a rough draft of a rough story by a rough writer. (Can't always be perfect!) Anyway, after I've read through and seen what's what, I'll have a (hopefully) clearer idea what needs to happen in each scene—what each scene contributes and what justifies it in the story—and put that into the new outline. This should help tighten up the storytelling.
• Somewhere in there, before, or after, I need to brainstorm more on what makes Simon so . . . messed up. But also—how he functions. How he creeps. Because I think what leaves me unsatisfied with his character is that he's not entirely defined and, as a result, it's hard to write him well—to write a character study like this at all—without a better understanding of who he is and how he does.
• One thing I'm both curious about and simultaneously not looking forward to is changing the narrative perspective. Right now, it's all in first person, but I think it needs to be third. Part of the awkwardness in conveying Simon is that I can't show what he's doing in the right light. That is, his perspective is obviously biased, so it's hard to reflect the (creepy) reality of his actions. That said, we'd lose a couple of things. 
• For one, direct access to his (hopefully creepy) thoughts and such. Perhaps I can restore some of that, and hopefully, enough of that, with hard work and my beloved free indirect discourse. Subtler and tougher, but also often, I've found, more satisfying? 
• The other thing we lose is perhaps just a tired trope in the first place: Because he's obsessed with her as an idea rather than seeing her as a person, I hadn't named her in the story. I think that only really works (if at all) in a first person approach because he's preoccupied; it'd probably be awkward and narratively dishonest to try that in the third person. The third person narrator isn't preoccupied like Simon, even if we're dabbling in free indirect discourse.

It's funny. Anthony commented that I had an advantage because I'm an editor so I'd come at writing as an editor or what have you. That only a quarter of writing is really writing; the rest is editing. At the time I pointed out how, historically, it's been a much a hang up as anything—overmeticulousness and perfection can block the writing process. But maybe he's kind of right: It seems like I am maybe coming at this with a more editorial eye for structure and process. Or maybe it's normal, and this is how writing is supposed to look. Who knows—I sure don't!

Anyway, I'll post more about my thoughts and progress later; this seems like as good enough a place to cut myself off as any.

Ponder, or so it's called.

So I've been working on a short story, and it's going a bit roughly. For now I'm calling it "Ponder," short for "transponder" as one such thing is indirectly the guiding force of the action. Although, now that I think about it, I might be thinking of the wrong word. Well, joy.

Meanwhile, it's sci-fi, which seems to be what I'm drawn to these days (some three of five stories I'd like to write are all sci-fi). It's also a bit of an exercise in nihilism, and I love that about it. How dark and hopeless can I make this?

I like the main character, Kimberly, even if I haven't fleshed her out completely. She'll be narrating things (more) as soon as I get things on track. More on that later. I love/hate the other main character, Oscar, who's basically a cynical philosopher-jerk. Can't say I'm too upset about that per se, but he feels almost too easy to write at times, and I'm not sure where I'm going with him. He feels prop-ish, at times.

The biggest problem I have is it's all dialogue so far. I've veered perhaps too far into "show don't tell," and "shown" everything rather than narrate any of it. Not in itself bad, I guess, but I'm not sure what to do with that. Is this normal for the writing process of a short story? The dialogue just keeps flowing out of me, and I don't know how to break it up without feeling like I'm breaking it.

Oh, right; worth mentioning that this is basically my first real attempt at writing a short story. At least, I think it is. It sure feels it--raw and unguided. Adrift. Lost. Unsure.

I feel compelled to work on it, sort of, all the same, though. I'm not sure where to go, so I'm doing my best, but at times I feel defeated or too uncertain before I even start. I know I should just push on, see what comes out, and work with what I have once I have it, but...it's difficult.

Oh well, more to come.

More Oliver has more.

So I've encountered some new thoughts for this short story I've been working on, and of course I haven't really worked on it at all what with all the stuff going on these past couple days.

One thing that frustrates me is I don't know how to work in new ideas. How do I preserve what I have done or do I even want to preserve what I've done? I mean, I have put work into the last couple of drafts, in shaping and honing them to support the direction I was going. And now...I just don't know. And it's really frustrating.

So, like, one thing is a line for Rick - "I just want to be able to have these feelings and not feel guilty about it". This refers to feeling scared or depressed or happy or relieved or whatever as relates to his cancer without feeling they're unwarranted or shameful. This kind of ties in with some of the stuff already discussed in the story--much like Rick's 'cause and effect' thing. Like, he worries there's not enough cause for having these feelings, so if he lets himself feel them he's being indulgent and wanton. (which, amusingly, is kind of how his character is, I suppose; so maybe he's actually aware of this about himself now and it scares him?)

Altogether that one line will require a bunch of restructuring, I think. It entails certain subjects and such to follow it, but also requires certain others to set it up (and set up those other following bits, too). At least I think it does. It feels like it's going to be this huge change and I don't know how to handle it if it is. Maybe I'm wrong, and it'll enjoin the rest of the existing action without much messying up. Or maybe it will shift the focus entirely, alter the direction, and instead of culminating in the whole "you're the one making yourself miserable, rick" thing it'll be something else?

Or maybe I can fiddle with that culminating bit. Instead of just referring to rick "keeping score" of his accomplishments and failures, it's also about legitimate feelings? Not sure how I'll do that. Not sure at all. Fuck.

Part of me wants to trash it all and start over or give up entirely. Or go take a nap and pretend it'll just be better later. Well, I think part of the nagginess is that this story grew out of my real feelings and circumstances, and this new dimension is something I've actually been feeling, and I want to remain true to it. But at the cost of the focus of the story? maybe, if I can make it work, sure. But I'm not sure I can. And that's annoying as fuck. Cuz I feel like I have to work this in for it to be a legitimate story. But maybe it's already moved on from my real life stuff and become it's own. Or maybe it's actually a very hollow, shallow affair because it doesn't ring true anymore. Fuckall.

I know, I know; if I just start fiddling about and poking it in differetn ways and trying things out, I'm sure it'll sort itself out. But my OCD hates wasting time doing unnecessary things (though it has no problem wasting time on absolutely useless diversions). So it's holding me up. I just can't get myself to do it because I have no idea what I'm gonna be doing. I guess I imagine fiction writing to be a singular, linear process, without retroactive editing or anything. And that's probably completely false, but I feel like I'd be failing at this if I do that. Fuckall.

Well, that's enough for today. I'll keep thinking things through, maybe even blog some useful notes tomorrow.

Stucky.

Well not really, not too terribly. I'm just a bit unsure how to proceed. Fiction is tough, y'know?

I was saying to Louis that I need to define the characters (and their dialogue) more, even out the story so that it functions better, and generally give everything a bit more focus.

Right now it feels kind of like the characters are irrelevant to the dialogue; that anyone could be speaking it, interchangeably, and it wouldn't matter so much. This isn't inherently or inextricably a problem--I'm sure revision will correct it--but it's annoying as fuck. I'm starting to find Rick's character, and Oliver's is taking shape but needs sanding down in some places.

I'm trying to figure out how to reveal things in a timely and subtle fashion, too. right now it's fairly obvious: some dialogue, some dialogue, reflective prose, repeat. If I could move some of these revelations into the dialogue, I'm sure it'd be less dry to read. The little reveals would feel less abrupt and would probaly help confirm and set eachother up more. Altogether, I can't help expecting this to even the flow and functioning of the stories parts.

And it needs focus. Right now it kind of wanders to a conslusion, which isn't terrible, but I'd like it to move with a bit more exactness or purpose. Like, not have things too focused on one thing then slip into another or stuff. I need to figure out what the story is about and what it's representing on the page. Ground it a bit more in reality and situations, even.

At this point it's not too surprising that I'm considering entirely rewriting some bits. Especially the prosey reflective bits. Most of them are highly significant to what's going, revealing important details and so on. Dialogue, too, to incorporate more detail and character expression and development, if only slight hints here and there that are then confirmed as the story continues and so on.

goddamn i'm sleepy as fuck. i may go lie down a mo' and then either try to write some more or leave it for tomorrow.


note: maybe a bit in the story where oliver reveales his great shame or something and they both feel an awkward obligation to help his friend....and brain died.

Some fict.

I finally got back to that little Oliver story I sketched out a couple weeks back. It felt good, it felt interesting. Hard to explain I guess.

Yesterday I picked it up again. As it had been a while and I hadn't revised it at all yet, it was basically a read through with comments and some markup. To be honest, I wish I had just read it first, then bothered with comments. The problem sections, the successful sections, all that came out better as I got through it. Certain earlier comments seemed like trifling worries as other more metasignificant things became apparent. But all in all it felt good; it felt...possible. This project is possible. There, I've said it.

big takeaways:

• Rick needs to be better defined, or earlier established, at least in my mind. Right now he's kind of carboardy at parts, esp the beginning.
• Oliver is doing okay development why; basically snark and sarcasm and an aversion to interpersonal connection, and i'm done. Expressing that is the tough part; it's a question of balance. How to inject those traits to create character effects and such without being intrusive, awkward, or contrived.
• the story definitely starts off kinda empty and actionless (is that it?); it's right about halfway through. Where Oliver proses/prosits "This wasn't what I'd hope for when I thoguht to drop by." Why is that, I wonder. I think because we're finally going inside these characters more; as a vignette and something of a character study, that's significant. Otherwise it feels like empty banter?
• as a housekeeping matter, I was trying out using word's annotations and comments and tracking changes and so forth. It was interesting. Got a bit more useful as I got the hang of it. Not sure exactly how this will work as a system yet, but it has definite possibilities.

So for today's work I'd like to...hm. options:

• liven up or figure out the opening section/exposition
• focus in on awkward passages and fix them
• rewrite? what should I rewrite? hm. I guess that's kinda tautalogical as any of the options will probably entail some manner of rewriting. hm. heh.
• figure out system for editing with Word's change tracking and comments?

God, this is really hard. It's new to me, though. I can write, yeah, and make a story with characters, yeah. But revision? and stuff? tough.

I might not even get all that much done today; I have to take care of a bunch of calls and shit, go grocery shopping, get hair cut (probs), and go to doctor. hm. I might be willing to poke at this later in the evening, but I'm kind of leery of that as it's outside my "schedule" and stuff. hm.

Correction.

So I posted yesterday at length about a character I'm reviving, Oliver Madison, in some short stories I want to work on. Lovely lovely, naturally.

Specifically, though, I was mistaken about just how old a character he was for me. I said I'd been thinking of him for maybe 4 years or so, give or take a month. Way off.

Try 10 yrs.

I'm currently on break from sorting through old papers and projects and notebooks for the move thing. First I found some notes about him in 2006; an intention to write a novel. I think he was going to get scapegoated via his outsider status via his tail? It seemed? Not sure, didn't read too closely really. But then I found notes in another notebook that were dated 04/01/2004. In that point it was all about him being some unwanted teen pregnancy raised by his uncaring grandparents.

But holy shit. This character better make me famous, cuz apparently I've hung on to him for a long ass time.

In other news, I also found a bunch of really old, really bad poetry I wrote. Obviously I'm keeping it, too, to keep me humble.

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?

Hoorah!

So yesterday, after blogging-on-the-go and doing a bit of thinking and reflective writing, I did some more drafting and it was a lot more effective/easier. I'd hardly call it "easy", but relative to the other day? Lord, I might actually keep some of the stuff I wrote this time.

The reflective writing touch on some of what the blog post had. Not wanting to be redundant, and wanting to maximize the writing's usefulness (?), I focused more on what I hoped I'd be able to do with that bit of writing and what I liked about what had come out of the previous one.

So I figured, as I wrote that reflective/focusing bit, that one thing I should probably do is set the scene/story a bit more. Frankly, I don't care too much about setting the/this scene. Kind of like Oliver, but hopefully more gracefully/effectively, I want to move on from the accident thing quickly. In his case it's because he's shit at dealing with normal things, nevermind trauma. Me, it's all for plot reasons.

Another note I made to myself, something I actually liked about the rough drafting the other day, was the way I ended up opening it.

"He'd never finished his fries."

In Oliver's mixed up/fucked up brain, he just can't let go of that. That he never got to eat his french fries before the accident struck, and that they're probably cold by now (nevermind covered in broken glass, etc). Yeah, the man survives an interstate pile-up and he's primarily fixated on french fries.

(You know how McDonald's fries are delicious but briefly, then they start to go cold and turn nasty the longer they go uneaten.)

What I really liked about it, though, was I'd already been considering ending it along those same lines. I'd had him worry about his fries near the outset in other early draftiness, but more recently I could tie it together by, despite so much of the story taking place in a fast food restaurant, he yet again doesn't get to eat his fries, and they've probably gone cold.

Hoorah for potential bookending!

Also, as I've just remembered, one strongly considered and highly likely way I may initiate Oliver's freakout/breakdown in the restaurant/restroom is with his trying to get some ketchup and the dispenser not working. This gets him thinking, obliquely, about codependence and what he's doing here at the restaurant at all.

You know, somehow it makes perfect sense to me to hang up a story about codependence and loss and trauma and coping on a scaffold of french fries. Hey, Arthur Miller opens Death of a Salesman with cheese as a blunt alleghory for the American Dream/Willie Loman's hang up(s).

Grrr!

I major fail at this. I tried writing the rough draft of this Oliver story, but I kept getting so self-conscious.

It just sounded stupid. Like, no flow in the sentences or harmony of the words.

I tweeted about my frustration this morning. Though I can't say I'm surprised, I'm a little bummed nobody replied with words of encouragement.

I don't mean I expected some cushy coddling. I just wanted to hear from someone that it's okay for rough drafts to sound a little stupid, to feel unfinished. Everything can be fixed later. It doesn't have to be like magic right away, and that's okay.

All plainly obvious enough, it may seem, but all this is new to me. Actually writing fiction; it turns out it's harder than you might think. And, again, I feel so, so self-concious.

I'm prolly overthinking all this. Like, way overthinking. As I mentioned yesterday, I need to give myself a chance. Put one word after another.

That reminds me of some advice someone once gave me: make the goal as simple as filling up the page, a word at a time even.

I'm gonna have a long wait before I get where I'm headed. Maybe that'll be a good time to try out that advice.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Introducing: Oliver

I'd had various ideas about this character for years. I'd more or less always thought of using him in several stories. At one point he was going to survive some massive car accident. At another point he was going to have been born with a human tail, and it'd be like a young adult novel about coming to terms with being different. At another point, he was going to be both.

At some point last spring or summer ideas started half-forming around Oliver. I had coffee with a writer friend, and told him about these and other thoughts about this character. Paul commented, "Wow, sounds like he's got a lot going on...". So I slashed the tail part, and focused on the whole car thing. It was a lot more interesting and better formed; the tail part, I realized, was comparatively tacked on.

As for the aftermath of the highway accident, there were a few possibilities. Early, early on I'd wanted to explore something of dysfunctional small town life--they'd be stuck, for whatever reasons, in some town out in the middle of nowhere. From there various possibly melodramatic or existential things were considered. Sink holes. Conspiring townsfolk. Self revelations. All that kinda stuff. My mind eventually wandered, and I somewhat forgot about the whole thing.

When I returned to it, I all but dismissed most of those possibilities. The reason? I'd revamped huge parts of Oliver's character. In the years since I'd last thought about him, I'd gone sober and been working an AA program. In the few months of going to meetings and examining myself, I'd noticed what fascinating and fucked up people alcoholics can be--drunk and, especially, sobering up. All the same old fucked up shit but no longer the emotional crutches of alcohol or other substances, leaving all sorts of maladjustments to run rampant.

So I decided he'd be a recovering alcoholic, specifically what's called a "dry drunk"--a sober alcoholic who isn't working any kind of program or doing anything different, really, except not drinking.

It's been surprisingly easy fleshing him out from there. Insecure, self-conscious, irrational, codependent, sarcastic, bitter, resentful, angry, weak, and so on. Obviously, actually developing the character will likely be tougher, but I've got a pretty good idea to work from.

At this point, that first story with him is coming along really nicely. I had a big-ass breakthrough the other day and outlined the plot in minutes. An actual plot, people. This is a new feeling for me, guys: I've never finished any of my writing projects before.

I'm kinda scared. I don't know if I know how to do this, guys. Developing a plot? creating characters? setting scenes? writing dialogue? laying out and revisiting themes? Jesus!

I think I'll keep doing what I've been doing--just, simply, writing. Saving the worrying and higher-level functions like thematic matrices for later parts. If things emerge sooner, awesome, but I needn't worry. At this point, it's about putting words on the page. Start at the beginning and going on till I come to the end, then stop.

And all the other worries--how to develop and what to develop about the accompanying character, Megan; how to lay out themes without being obnoxiously blunt about it; pacing things....--will have to be put aside for now. That's going to be tough. Really really tough. Or really easy. Who knows.

I'll just have to find out, I guess.