So I'm writing this chain of stories and now I've got three of them complete and out the door and in the mail and off to literary publications where they will likely be rejected because that's the way this works. Not that I don't have hope for them--I think each of these three stories is pretty darn okay in my book, and if someone else wrote them, I'd probably happily read them, and enjoy them with one hand, even while cursing them for stealing stories out of my head with my other hand. Oh, in the event that other people write the stories and books that I wish I'd written, my hands are busy indeed, what with their forehead-slapping exclamations of joy and their fist-shaking furious table-pounding all going on at once. It's an awful lot like rubbing your stomach and feeding the baby at the same time, when you come to think about it: takes a certain amount of skill, no? I'll say this much, if I had a baby, I'd do some clinical research, just to find out how true the comparison is, because that's how much I care about you, my devoted reading audience. Yup, all two or three of you who haven't gone out the back door to catch the late showing of CSI because it's addicting like crack with half the negative health and social benefits. Not that I blame those who did leave already, mind you, because, hey: crack.
Ah, so I'm writing this chain of stories--and, well, this chain really needs some kind of official title, so I can refer to it idly by a proper name when I'm discussing my projects and the current weather with idle passers-by who are more interested in the latest exploits of Law and Order: SVU's Eliot and Olivia than the are about the inner-workings of the mind of some jackass writer-wannabe from Cleveland. I was for a while calling it The Dildo Cycle because that was very appropriate when there was only one story and not much of a cycle to speak of (in that that one story deals with a pet rock named Dildo, and no, I'm giving nothing away there, because I mention the oddly-named odd pet in the first sentence of the story, which pretty much removes this factoid from the Shyamalanesque realm of "not another blasted twist ending") and mere dreams about the rest of the stories that would make up said at-the-time nonexistent cycle. Now, though, with three actual stories in this cycle--I'm not even calling it a cycle anymore but a chain--I see that to label the entire thing as "The Dildo Cycle" is quite inappropriate, and might cause people to read more into the stories than I ever intended. But I'm at a loss for an official title just yet because I'm not ready to make a premature choice and besides the cycle or chain or knotted-rope ladder might end at any moment and then how much of a joker would I look like? So I guess you've got no choice but to bear with me as I refer to it, the braided watchband of stories, as "that bunch of stuff I'm doing to give myself something better to do at night than order cable and watch Trading Spaces all the time". Or, I guess, you do have a choice--you could order cable and go watch Trading Spaces instead of listen to me refer to anything at all. You know. Your call.
So I'm working on these stories, which I someday envision becoming a sort of collection, were I to survive long enough to write the standard minimum number of stories that can be lumped together to be considered a collection, which I haven't done the current conversion rates on so I've no idea what that number is, and I've got enough written now that, though I shouldn't because the soon to be mentioned activity could potentially be as distracting and as momentum-crushing as a series of false-start realistically parenthetical paragraphs at the beginning of an already too-long blog post which has yet to reach the points promised by the none-too-alluring title, I do look back at them now to see what I'm doing, what I've done, and where I might go from here. I ask myself a lot of questions about these topics, most of which I answer with shoulder-shrugging and a vague desire to go out and buy some ice cream--chocolate, with candy in it--to distract myself from further consideration of the big issues I've landed myself in the midst of as skillfully as a parachutist dropping into the middle of a bullfight. I promise like hell my fiction is more carefully written and considered than that last simile, which is about to be unfortunately and probably inaccurately extended into the following paragraph.
Watching the bullfight of issues and thoughts take place around me, I have noticed two of said issues that stand out clear amongst the fray of bull sweat and clown pants, which I would like to address here. These two issues are, first, the fact that, in my fiction, I default to telling stories in the first person, and second, that most of the characters I've written in this series so far, including to some degree the narrator of the fourth story in the series that I'm currently working on, aren't so much going through things right now, but are thinking a lot about stuff that happened to them some time ago, sometimes on a meta-level of thought about thinking about the past. These topics and/or issues will probably not be covered in full in the following portion of this post, because it is late and I am tired, but I will come back to them again to further pluck out the hearts of their depths and expose them for the world to see, but hopefully without any gross stuff like you might see on E.R., because man, I've got a queasy stomach when it comes to medical drama, or just medical things in general. So I guess you can toss this onto the heap of posts that start series of posts on issues and topics I'm concerned with that you might also be concerned with which will hopefully spark fascinating discussions over coffee with attractive girls who wear glasses and/or nice boys who don't seem like total dickheads. Take your pick, and be honest, because nobody's keeping score around here.
The First Person
So I tend to write my stories in the first person. But it's not so much that I'm trying to be those characters--I'm not writing them as if they were me or I were them. Rather, it's like, they're them, and I'm me, and they're trying to tell stories, and I'm the one in charge of making them do that. I write for them, but I am not them; I feed them lines of my own hopes and fears, but then they take them and go with them to their own places; they are the ones who tell the stories, and I am merely trying to make the stories they tell as compelling and as fascinating as possible. Sometimes I think about trying to switch out of this gear and write stories in the third person, especially now at this point in this chain, when I've written three first-person stories, hopefully through narrators who are all distinct, recognizable characters that yet maintain a certain non-obvious consistency of voice--my voice. It's a little weird, but I want them all to sound like themselves, yet I want the writing to all be of me.
What's interesting though is that I once read through a series of comments on Slashdot--I was bored--that dealt with the topic of first-person perspectives in video games. Somewhere buried within the thread I read a comment by someone who said that nobody writes in the first person anymore because it's too hard, because it limits the amount of material and perspective one can bring into the story, novel, whatever. You can go ahead now and make that horrified face again--I know I did.
The Retrospective View of Events
This one, I'm more concerned with. Not so much that telling stories about things that happened before now is at all bad--in any given day, we spend approximately seventy-seven percent of our time thinking about things that happened to us before right now, and yes, I did just make that number up, but if I hadn't admitted to this little bit of deceit, you probably would have nodded and agreed with me, because, hey, it sure does seem right, doesn't it? We live lives and part of those lives is to look back at where we've come from and compare it to where we are now and thank whatever deity in whatever remote or nearby plane we worship or don't worship that we're not back in high school anymore, what with the whole being awkward and not having any friends thing going on; really, seriously, I think that's what memory gives us first and foremost: the right to feel better about ourselves because at least we're not going through puberty anymore. Yech. Bleah.
But I come to fiction with the perception that it's all made-up and when you make stuff up you can do pretty much anything you want, however you want, whenever you want, except not when you're driving on the highway, because if you thought cell phones were bad, wait until you see people writing novels when they're driving 65. This doesn't mean all fiction should be experimental and it doesn't mean that straight-forward fiction can't be risk-taking; one of my favorite novels ever is Interstate by Stephen Dixon, which, if you haven't read it, you should, because it's beautiful and heartbreaking, and it's a formal experiment wrapped around some of the most lovely straight-forward story-telling I've ever read, and the ending of the book made me want to lie down on a mattress and stare at the ceiling and stop writing forever because I'll never be that perfect.
What this means is that, when you write one story one way, there's nothing stopping you from writing another story another way, just because you can. So while I'm pretty comfortable with first person for right now and feel no need to roll the dice there just yet, what I do want to do is try to pull characters out of the retrospective mode and start shifting them into current events mode. I think there's been a sort of motion towards that through these stories, and it's a motion I'd like to continue. The first story--it was all about the back then. The third story? Mostly back then, but then all the meta-retrospective stuff got pulled it, and things got a bit weird, yet deliciously fun to write. This fourth story: I think things are going to be evenly balanced. The now sparks memories of the then, and the then has a direct influence on the right now, and somehow, this is going to work. But we'll see.
And In Conclusion
A friend of mine, who shall be forced here to go by the pseudonym "Chris C." so that women don't walk up to him on the street asking him to give me their underthings because they're just so in love with me and they would just die to be my friend too, told me tonight that he's quite excited at the prospect of someday getting rejection letters for his stories, too, so that he too can refer to it as being "Mr. Dixoned". (The root of that joke can be found at http://www.thegrue.org/writing/ which is where I keep loving and excited track of how often I get rejected by people with better taste in slush than I do.)
And In Conclusion, Too
I really have no graceful way to end this post and I was hoping I could distract you from that fact with the previous conclusion. Consider this my apology for such a dirty trick. I hope you won't hold it against me...in a court of law. DTHUNG-DTHUNG!
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