Becoming Somebody

As I declared in my state of the union, my new Fiction Friday model will be to post working drafts of the story I happen to be working on at the time. This week, for the last three weeks really, I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to break through this creative impasse that’s been plaguing me for most of the month of January. It’s not happening … yet. But I’m hopeful.

What I have today is about two pages of a story I started writing weeks ago. I’ve had as many as five pages written in the course of the three weeks, but I didn’t like where it was going, so I erased it and started again. Then I wrote three more pages, but still didn’t like. This is the fourth incarnation, and I honestly don’t know if any of it will last beyond today.

Without giving away any of the plot points I have in my head, I’m trying to write a story that deals with loss. For this character, my plan is for him to be dealing with an abortion he saw an ex-girlfriend through some time ago. I think I chose to write about this now because I’ve had enough of the recent trend in movies to use unplanned pregnancy as nothing more than comic fodder without really exploring any of the emotional difficulty that comes with it. I’m talking to you Juno and Knocked Up. Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers says he overheard someone say, in reference to Juno: “This movie sends the wrong message to teen girls about pregnancy: No problem, girl, just kick it old school and Jennifer Garner will take your baby, your parents will support you, and your boyfriend will still think you’re hot. Yeah, right.” I couldn’t agree more with whoever said this. The reality of a situation like that festering on someone is what I want to try to peel away at.

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If anyone out there is curious to know whether literary magazines and journals use form letters to notify authors of rejected manuscripts, I can verify that they do indeed use a standard response format. See below for visual evidence.

After Anderbo rejected The Sounds I Hear last Thursday, I sent them The Often Unheralded Affect of Burnt Bagels and Weak Coffee. And while they took longer than fifteen hours to turn me away this time, they still told me where I can stick my story and how far. OK. It wasn’t that harsh, but, regardless of the tone, yours truly is still unpublished.

I have two more submissions I’m waiting to hear back on, one at The Hub and another at One Story. I’m not expecting good things. Maybe I should read The Secret.

It’s always nice to know something you created, something you spent time on and put a piece of yourself into, was so awful it took someone else just a few hours to reject outright. I’m not sure I have enough preexisting self-esteem to do this much longer. Now I know how that one guy on Project Runway who’s always crying because he sucks feels.

Did I just admit I watch Project Runway? I think I did. If I told you I only watched because of Heidi Klum would you believe me? No. OK. So what. Who cares? I watch the show. Big deal. Anyone want to make something of it?

In the wake of my first professional rejection, I dropped two more stories into e-mails this afternoon. I sent The Sounds I Hear to a great online journal called Anderbo and The Often Unheralded Affect of Burnt Bagels and Weak Coffee to The Hub, another really nice source for short fiction by new and not-so-new writers.

As always, I’ll let you all know as soon as the rejection notes get e-mailed my way.

When I started this project, I told myself I’d share everything, the good and the bad, for the sake of honesty. That being said, have a look at what came in the mail this week. Click here to read the story the editors of Open City rejected from their magazine.

The story I started working on yesterday, and will continue working on today, is actually a piece I wrote a few months back but was unhappy with at the time. Of course, I was so beaten down creatively by my employment at insert name of professional sports league here that I failed to finish it in any satisfactory way. That will hopefully change during the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. In this way, the story is sort of recycled, hence the going green reference. Get it. Recycled. Environmentalism. Going green. Stay with me, folks. We like to move quickly around here.

To give you a little bit of background on the story, its title is “The Often Unheralded Affect of Burnt Bagels and Weak Coffee.” As usual for one my creations, it is not plot heavy and, instead, focuses on the inner psychological workings of the main character, Nathan Yearlman, an eighty-four-year-old man living alone, more or less waiting to die. He has peculiar habits, and the story drops in on him in bed one early morning.

An interesting tidbit to note is that during the holidays this year, a member or two of my family, echoing something I’ve heard more than a few times prior, commented that it appears the inspiration behind a lot of the themes and characters in my stories are more than a little transparent, thinly veiled references to people I know and things they’ve done. This is an astute observation, and it’s mostly true. When you’re trying to churn things out of your imagination, you inevitably turn to people, places, and events you’ve experienced. Other people fascinate me, and I’m interested in exploring the things that make them tick. And like any other artist, I draw on things I know to create sketches of characters that are as real to me as anyone else in my world, full of flaws and ugly ideas, many of them difficult to like. That is the reality I want to create and share.

But my goal has never been to comment on or judge anyone. Once I outline the sketch, I let go of the person who inspired it and try my best to give the character a life of his or her own. There’s not much more to it than that. I don’t suppose to know for sure why anyone does what they do, so I don’t bother trying to figure it out. I believe that all people are a thousand times more complicated than they let on, so it’s more interesting and effective to make up my own neuroses than it is to analyze someone else’s.

I think there is a common thread among all these characters, and that, more than anything else, is what seems to have presented itself as the unifying theme of my work lately. All of the people in my stories do the majority of their dialogging internally, with their own minds. Their internal conversations are often layered and a little dark, some would even say negative. Yet, the way they often articulate themselves outwardly is simple and stoic, a lot of times completely contradictory to the way they think and feel. If you were to go back and look at “It Helps to Watch” or “The Sounds I Hear,” that element is pretty clear. For some reason, that is where my mind has chosen to set up shop.

I can psychoanalyze myself and hypothesize that this trait is a reflection of something in me, that it somehow allows me to deal with an ability to effectively express myself to others, that it lets me share something about myself, an attempt to be understood and validated by people I don’t feel I relate to, but I’m not a therapist. I just write stories that make me feel a certain way, and I try to do that in as unique a way as possible, something akin to auteurism in film. It’s like a mirror I look into every week, and I never know what the reflection is going to look like until someone else sees it.

There is a famous quote by Jackson Pollock where he answers the question, “How do you know you’re finished [with a painting]?” by asking, rhetorically, simply, perhaps arrogantly, “How do you know when you’re finished making love?”

My problem right now is that I’m pretty sure I’ve finished making love, but I’m not sure I’ve satisfied anyone but myself. And what good is love making if you’re only pleasing yourself? Then it’s nothing more than masturbation.

I have a story in place. It’s just a character sketch. No plot. Nothing happens. I’ve said all I want to say about the character. I’m more or less satisfied. But I’m also worried that it is totally inaccessible to anyone else reading it and will leave them, at best, unsatisfied or, at worst, totally turned off and bored. In which case, I should have rubbed this one out for myself, another pointless waste of time. I desperately want to please my audience, but I don’t want to compromise in any way to do so.¹ The process is agony.

1. I think I just heard Penn Jillette say this about Don Rickles. I don’t want to jack someone else’s quote without proper citation.

I just sent this envelope, containing my story “It Helps to Watch,” to Open City, a literary publisher that has put out some really great writers I very much admire. Here is some info for those who may be unfamiliar with Open City (www.opencity.org):

About Open City

Open City Magazine & Books are published by Open City, Inc., a nonprofit corporation based in New York City. The editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, strive to keep the literary journal vital for each new generation by publishing a dynamic array of poetry and prose with a daring, youthful, spirit. The editors aim to add a voice to the culture that values wit, depth, and ingenuity, and, in particular, the exposing and elucidating of the human predicament which is often devalued by commercial publishers. Many writers featured in Open City’s pages are being published for the very first time.

The magazine was founded in 1990 by Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck and the book series was founded in 1999 by Robert Bingham. The magazine comes out three times per year, and at this time Open City Books releases one book per year. The magazine and books are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

“Open City reminds me of what I crave from magazines: surprise, humor, nerve, a sense of collective imagination that takes in the totality of the enterprise and is reflected in each contribution so that the thing is more than the sum of its parts.”—Luc Sante

“An athletic balance of hipster glamour and highbrow esoterica.”—The Village Voice

“A heady mix of narrative styles and storytelling . . . The brightest names in young international fiction, poetry, and essay writing.”—The Fader

It is the first time I have submitted any original work for publication, and I am physically on edge because of it.

I’m not sure what frightens me more, the thought of being rejected or of being accepted. I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone outside of a creative field, but third-party validation is this daunting thing that has existed Out There for so long that I’ve put it on a pedestal, bookmarked it as this larger-than-life entity I so desperately want but am still intimidated by.

At the same time, though, I’m so committed to doing things on my own terms, creating the work I want to create, that I’d want to read, that I think deserves a place alongside the work I respect, that I can’t worry about satisfying someone else. There’s a feeling in me that if you don’t get what I’m doing, you don’t get it. It’s your problem, not mine. But I depend on other people to give greater worth to my work. Without that acceptance, I’m nothing. Everything I do teeters on that line, and putting myself out there to be judged makes me feel naked and alone. It’s something I haven’t gotten used to and, in a weird way, hope I never do.

I wanted to slap her ass, maybe squeeze it a bit before telling her to roll off and let me up. But I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, smelling her hair. It’s hard to believe we had waited this long to get this thing done, but it fit the bill for me. I’m the kind of guy who’ll probably starve to death licking his lips over a steak sandwich.

*I actually think this paragraph is pretty good, I just don’t know where it came from or where it wants to go. It’ll probably live a solitary life in my notebook, sipping condensed tomato soup from a thermos cup, maybe watch Charles in Charge reruns before bed.

* Please pardon the obesity of my face and head. If I was prettier, I’d probably be on TV.

Rarely do I like anything I do. This is especially true of things I write. I hate everything. The flaws always outweigh the strengths. I’m just never happy because things rarely turn out the way I imagine them in my head. There’s a disconnect between what I’m feeling and the way I’m able to express it. Language is imperfect in that its conventions limit the extent to which words can relate to the ultimate meanings they are meant to symbolize. Words are just too limited to tell the whole story.

This becomes doubly hard when the story I’m trying to tell is an abstract one. The words are never good enough, and I fight with this constantly. Last week, though, for the first time in my life as a writer, I felt like I successfully told the story I wanted to tell.

“It Helps to Watch” allowed me to finally let go and unhinge my creativity. I refused to hold back, and I finally wrote from inside a character, even though I was worried people would have a hard time relating to him because he was so perverse.

I think I’d been building to this in previous weeks, and you get a taste of it in “The Prayer Room,” but the work hadn’t gotten to a point where I thought it could stand up to a stringent literary analysis. For my taste, “It Helps to Watch” advanced to that next level.

It’s not that I think it’s a perfect story. There are a million things about it that could be better. It’s just that the story works. Everything that I was trying to say, I said. There’s something unsettlingly normal about Harold Dreyfuss, and while he’s an extreme case, I think there is something universal about him that makes it all the more creepy.

But there’s more to Harold than just a creepy guy who wants to have sex with your children. He knows that what he feels is wrong, and he’s trying so hard to overcome his inner demons, even though he knows how he’d feel if he were able to succumb to them and finally satisfy himself. I think his struggle resonates really well, and I have a lot of respect for Harold as a result.

But the story works on another level, too, and that is why I liked it so much.

Instead of living as he is programmed to live, Harold pretends to fulfill a sociological standard of normal, and I think we are all guilty of this crime. We pretend to care about things that only server to destroy us — careers, money, consumerism — in the same way Harold pretends to care about being the kindly old janitor. All we are doing is denying ourselves, though, just like Harold is denying himself. So while he’s living this normal life, he is constantly tormented by the things he wants to be.

The point of making him a pedophile was to comment on the way our society views those who cannot or will not mold into gluttonous, capitalist drones void of any real soul. If you are driven to pursue happiness and personal fulfillment over a life dominated by economic self-interest, you are put on the same level of weird as someone who wants to fuck children. The world makes you feel just as tormented as Harold. That was the point of this story. I wasn’t trying to creep anyone out. I wasn’t trying to comment on the harmfulness of pedophilia or to tell the story of one troubled soul. I was trying to say more, and for the first time I feel like I did.

I think I’m starting to understand how to tell stories in a more provocative way so they transcend the surface narrative. I really hope I’m able to hang on to this, because if I lose it I’m afraid I won’t get it back.