Becoming Somebody

With a new year upon us, I sit down and evaluate where I’ve been and where I’m going. There are some nice New Year’s resolutions, too, most of which I’m sure I will not keep.

* The conclusion of this story is still pending.

I’ve decided that it’s stupid and pointless to give myself a grade on the stories I write because I realized I never read them once they go up on the site. I might read a sentence or two from time to time, but I don’t sit and read them from start to finish. So what I end up grading is the process, how easily the idea came to me, how I thought it went as I was writing. But that’s not really the measure of a story’s success or failure. I’ll leave the measure of my success to the people reading. I have other things to worry myself with.

I still want to provide some insight, whenever possible, into what these stories are about or where they come from, though. I’ll continue posting any thoughts I have on a story the Monday or Tuesday after it publishes. I hope these posts and video blogs help get inside my head a little and explain where I’m coming from, even if you don’t get it or think I’m weird.

“The Sounds I Hear” was pretty straightforward. The story is about how we can do a lot of talking without really communicating, and how we need to listen to each other if we want to have any kind of connection to the people are us. After all, everything comes down to the sounds and words you choose to hear. What is really being communicated in an argument with someone? What does that garbage-truck rumble make you think? It’s all about sorting through the noise and getting to the heart of it. That’s what the story was about. I think that message comes through pretty clearly. To that end, I’m happy with the way it turned out.

All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy. A very dull boy, indeed.

* 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.

When I sat down at the keyboard to write last Tuesday, the sting of the previous Friday’s lower-than-expectations effort was still fresh in my memory. As I blogged about in great detail, I thought my characters were flat, which led to a necessarily flat story. That being said, my only goal last week was to create a real character with life and genuine emotional depth. I had no idea what story I wanted to tell or what themes I wanted to explore.

“The Clothes We Wore Then” developed pretty naturally, as a result. I don’t think I’ve written that way in a long time, and I’m starting to think maybe I should. There was a freedom to the process that hasn’t been there in a while. The story came in a more organic way, which allowed me to concentrate on creating the best story and the best characters possible. I’m usually so worried about trying to get different thematic elements into a story that I forget to cover the most basic things: Tell the story. Make people care.

The story follows a pretty simple narrative structure, but I was happy with the depth it had and the themes it managed to explore, even though I paid no attention to these things until I sat down to write the second draft. Instead of trying to inject the themes into the story, I let the story create them on its own. All I did was brush them up a bit. And because they emerged naturally, I think they came through in a more meaningful way. It felt like I was uncovering this story more than creating it from nothing. It was really nice for a change.

The first sentence that come to me when I wrote the first draft was, “He closed the closet quickly so nothing came spilling out.” Everything else came from there, even though that sentence ultimately fit in toward the end of the story. I thought about how that sentence made me feel. It didn’t make me feel sad as much as it made me feel like I was avoiding something. I didn’t want to write about me, though, so I tried to think about who else would feel this way and why. That’s how I found Andrew, wearing an uncomfortable suit, sitting on a park bench alone, sometime after his father’s funeral. I liked the way that scene looked in my head so I went with it. The rest sort of snowballed from there.

I got a lot of feedback saying “The Clothes We Wore Then” was too sad. Maybe I’m just a more solemn guy than most, but I don’t think it’s sad at all. If I had to choose a word to fill in the phrase, “This is a _______ story,” I’d probably use the word truthful.

As a reader, I think I felt sorry for Andrew more than anything. He just doesn’t get it. He missed out on an opportunity to make peace with his father. Now he’s missing out on a chance to give himself some peace by accepting things and moving on.

I think a “happy” ending to this story would have been for Andrew to put the picture and/or the watch into his pocket, but I don’t think that would have been the most honest conclusion. Andrew’s feelings were all so fresh, and I think it takes more than a few hours to come to profound realizations of self. Andrew just wasn’t ready for that yet. I’d like to think he’ll get there eventually, though.

The only reason I didn’t like this story more was because the ending lacked the punch it needed to bring things home. My sister said I wussed out at the end. I don’t think that’s completely true. I just think I failed to execute the ending I chose in the best way possible. There was a build up of momentum while Andrew was struggling to put the box in the closet that I should have carried through to the end. Instead, I chose to wind things back down, which works really well for some stories but, in hindsight, not as well with this one. I think I was trying to channel (yet again) my inner Kerouac, whose meandering, sort of melancholy ending to “On The Road” brings an otherwise frantic story to a lazy, drawn-out close.*

Better luck next time, I suppose.

*In the case of OTR, this is a very good thing.

Now that my first short story has had a weekend to breathe, and I’ve had a couple days to remove myself from the process of writing it, I can honestly say that I wasn’t too pleased with the final result. It’s not that I think it turned out badly. I just think it was mediocre. And it was mediocre because the character was poorly developed.Character development in short fiction is really hard because you’re trying to pack a lot of ideas into a limited number of words. It’s something I need to pay a lot more attention to.

Right now, I think my technical skills — my ability to construct sentences and put together words in a pleasant-sounding way — are pretty strong. I also think the first half of the story turned out well. I liked most of the stuff up until the time Jim returned home from Vietnam. Everything after that seemed a bit too hurried. The part that really bugs me, though, is that I don’t know what I would have written differently. Problems of execution are easier to fix, I think, than problems of conceptualization.

I need to devote more time to the creation of my characters and less time worrying about the thematic elements of the story. Those will come through on their own if the story itself is told in the correct way. At the end of the day, the only reason people read and love books and stories is because of the characters in them. Otherwise, all you have is an essay. And I think “I Wish Dick Cheney Would Up and Die Already” is a pretty good essay. It’s just a completely average story.

I need to make the reader feel who these people are. I can’t just tell them what happened in their lives at the time the story takes place. The ability to do that is what distinguishes a writer from a person who writes. And right now, that’s what I am: a person who writes.