The Annual Tradition: A Love Letter To Those Who Kill
Every Memorial Day, I link to my Memorial Day essay: A Love Letter To Those Who Kill.
Two years ago, someone expressed concern about the gendered language of this essay, of the repeated usage of “our boys” when there are, in fact, a lot of women in the military risking their lives as well. She felt that using the term “our boys,” though traditional, renders women invisible. She asked me to revise the essay to change this.
Unfortunately, a combination of “this is a snapshot what I said then, no matter how dumb it may sound to me now” and “I’ve watched George Lucas edit his shit into horror” and “I’m not sure in editing I wouldn’t change the meaning/introduce other errors which would then need to be edited” makes me have a rule that I don’t edit an essay at all once it’s been up for a day or two. (Otherwise, I would doubtlessly edit some of my more controversial essays into such well-reasoned processes that people would wonder what the fuss was about. And the job of this blog is not to always make me look good or enlightened.)
But she raises a good point. This year, I’ll ask you to raise an extra-special toast to the women in our services, and will go out of my way to reference the women (and the gendered flaw in the essay) whenever I link to it in the future.
In any case, flaws and all, here it is.
Tales Of A Fourth-Rate Nothing: Busking On The Wrong Street Corner
During Clarion, I coined the phrase “busking on the wrong corner” to describe the phenomenon of “entertaining writing that doesn’t serve the story.” It’s the reason writers have to kill their darlings. It’s the trap that stops a lot of good writers from making the transition to great.
“Busking” is the practice of playing in public spaces for donations – you know, that guy playing the guitar, his guitar case open before him, full of scattered singles and quarters. Buskers are often some of the most talented musicians. But the buskers’ art is also partially a knowledge of where the crowds are.
You can sing your fucking heart out on a corner where there’s no foot traffic. If you’re really good, you might make a few bucks. But if you’re really good and really smart, you’ll position yourself near the subway where people are pouring out by the hundreds as rush hour ends, a place where even a mediocre musician can clean up. Part of your strength is not just the raw force of your musicianship, but knowing where to place that skill so it’s maximized with silver rains of spare change.
Writers (me included, oh so included) are often putting their talents to use on the wrong corner. This chapter is brilliant writing, it’s got great characterization, it’s exciting. But underneath, the scene is at odds with what the story is trying to do, and what you’ll wind up with is a great scene that advances the story in the wrong ways.
Lemme give you the real-life example: the lead character of the novel I’m plotting right now, Autumn Akeley, is a taxidermist. In the beginning of the book, Autumn is deep in the woods on a rumor, searching for the Hulk.
Why the Hulk, you ask? Because she’s not just any taxidermist – she makes wild viral videos online parodying recent movies in order to drive business to her online taxidermy shop. Autumn’s latest planned video (“The Bearvengers”) needs a gigantic, light-skinned animal she can dye green to play the part of the Hulk. Autumn does not kill animals for her entertainment (she takes the death of any creature very seriously), but she just got a tip from a hunter that there’s a decaying grizzly in the woods she might be able to use. She tracks it down with her friend Karla and examines the corpse – it’s a little too moldy for her liking, but it has very light fur. She thinks she can salvage it.
Then a shot rings out across the forest: there are poachers in the woods. As someone who hates to see an animal killed senselessly, she does not take lightly to poachers. She sets off to investigate, starting the chain of events that sets up the novel….
…Now, that’s a pretty good scene. It’s got an interesting character doing something we’ve never seen done before in a book, it displays her odd compulsions, it allows us to watch her work (if you have a character with an odd profession, people love to see the fine details), and for a short intro it’ll do quite nicely.
And yet we are busking badly here. Why?
Because this novel is about Autumn’s friendship with Karla.
Okay, unfair, I didn’t tell you that – but the whole point of the novel is that a new man in town with a shadowy past begins to romance Karla, causing a rift when Autumn discovers the man’s past as a serial killer. And this scene, while good in a vacuum, utterly fails to set up the dynamics of Karla and Autumn and their friendship. In fact, you’d be excused for forgetting the existence of Karla in this summary, because while we can put in some nice dialogue and characterization to set up Karla’s character, the underlying structure of the scene is not about her at all.
This is a great scene for a novel featuring bold Autumn Akeley, bold adventurer. It’s a terrible scene for Autumn and Karla’s big fight – especially since the next scene involves Autumn tracking down poachers, which has even less to do with their friendship. And if you’re not a careful writer, you’ll think this is an awesome scene because it’s got it all – humor, good characterization, a quick hook to action – without realizing that it’s an awesome scene that’s structurally at odds with what you want to do in the long run. It doesn’t set up the things that need to be established.
It’s a good scene in isolation. In context, it’s a darling that needs to be killed… Or at least dramatically changed so that Karla does something so interesting here that the scene metamorphosizes away from Autumn’s search for the Hulk and into an expression of how Autumn and Karla couldn’t get along without each other.
The point I’m making here is that had I written that chapter, I’d have been very proud. It’d be a nice, 1,500 word opener that would grab the reader, full of lovely details and fun stuff.
And then I’d have to place it into my trash folder, because ultimately it doesn’t do what it needs to, then hunt for the right scene to write.
More FetLife Posts
I’ve been quiet here as I’ve been slogging through the usual Seasonal Depression, but I did post two essays over at FetLife (TheFacebookforkinksters) that you may be curious about: “Depression. Fucking. Depression.”, which deals with how depression affects my sex life, and “Ropeweasels,” which deals with the issue of me being tied up. (There’s also “Fireplay and Me,” an oddly poetic musing on setting women aflame, which I don’t think I linked here but maybe I did.)
In addition, my humor essay “So I’m Going To Become A Dom” may be my most popular essay ever, with 612 comments and 965 loves. I guess it’s all about the specificity.
An Odd Change In A Dying System
Back in The Day, when I had infinite people reading me on LiveJournal, I’d post an entry and the comments exploded. I’d hit “post,” and five minutes later I’d have fifteen comments.
Now, I make a big ol’ important post and sometimes I don’t get a comment for half an hour. That used to unnerve me – is this a bad entry? Did I say something wrong? – until I realized what was happening. English LiveJournal is slowly dying.
What used to happen was that the LJ friends page was like Twitter or Facebook now – so constant a stream of data that you just refreshed your friends’ page and wham, new entries. Maybe you didn’t check it twenty times a day like I did, but the friends page was a ritual where my latest entry popped up in real time. I was a part of the info-stream.
As LJ use has declined, though, the traffic patterns have changed for me. People no longer read my blog as part of a daily pulse; it’s in their RSS feeds, or bookmarked separately, or they wait for me to post the interesting links to Twitter (since I don’t Tweet-spam every post). I still get roughly the same number of comments, but as opposed to arriving in one explosive comment-dump, they now arrive scattered over the course of two days, like late passengers departing a red-eye connection. I’m read at their convenience, not the convenience of LJ.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a little weird. Some days I post a SRS ENTRY and then wait until I get one comment just to ensure someone’s listening. By the time I get out of the tub, I have like three comments, which used to be the sign of an entry falling on its face. Now, I’m patient; the user feedback will arrive in due course.
If you write it, they will come.
Bill, I Believe This Is Killing Me
The Seasonal Affective Disorder is really fucking with me this year. I’m on medications, which helps, but not really.
See, the Paxil means that it’s not slamming me for ten days. I’m feeling okay for a day at a time, and then the SAD slips in and WHAM. The whole afternoon vanishes because I’m just sitting here crying and breaking down and I don’t know what to do.
With the old SAD, it sucked, but I got used to it. A constant suck was horrid, but I could adjust, keep working, get everything done. This is a horror show where I’m okay, I’m okay, then suddenly I’m through the trap door. And I can’t handle this.
I’m struggling harder now that it’s lessened. I honestly don’t know what to do. And I guess maybe that’s not what a blog is for, but I try to chronicle my existence and today I was about to get back to work and then I was all like, “I shouldn’t be trying to sell The Upterlife. I’m reading Saladin’s book, it’s so much better, I’m an awful writer, no agents are interested anyway and it’s just going to be a long slow haul to the inevitable stop of my talent, yes I lucked out once with the Nebulas but this book isn’t it and it sucks and I should just toss it away and hope the next one is better and oh God why am I bothering it takes so much fucking effort just to get anything halfway decent.”
How can I work like that? When I’m just assaulted by ghosts?
Blast It To Flinders, Come Back Stronger: On Exciting Failures And Deleting Two Months Of Work
So I’m 30,000 words into a new novel, and this weekend I realized that I have to throw out everything except for the first 600 words. The last two months of work? Completely erased. Hit “Delete” and kiss that effort goodbye.
Normally there’s something to be scavenged from a manuscript collapse, but this is a total implosion. My protagonist used to be a harried, frightened nerd, prone to punching when cornered; in this new novel she will become a nerd-king, the kind of super-popular high-school kid that has yet to realize that she’s peaking and that things have already begun to slope downwards. The villain in my old book was a charming, well-meaning rogue; now he’s a sneering killer who’s only masquerading as human. I’m reducing everything to such rubble that there’s nothing I can retain.
Such an exciting failure.
Failing is a good thing in writing; it means you’re taking risks. But furthermore, it indicates you’re skilled enough to recognize that you’re writing something flawed. Which is a sign of growth to be cherished.
A few years back, I would have looked at the scenes I’d written and said, “But those are good scenes!” And indeed, they are; some of them are touching and beautiful and honest in a way that I’d never been capable of before. There’s a scene where my protagonist faces down her reclusive, immature father to have to justify her expulsion from school – which was one of the subtlest and truest things I’ve ever written. There was a lot of good stuff in that 30k, personal high-water marks.
Yet the novel as a whole wasn’t up to snuff, with character largely revealed through interminable interior monologues and backstory instead of action. The fact that I recognized that was a sign of how far I’d come. And figuring out how to fix it involved a combination of using every tool I’d developed as a writer and having the boldness to go, “No, this can’t be massaged back into position.”
Now, I’m trying a new technique: I’ve never outlined a novel before. I’ve only written the scene that comes next, hoping my internal searchlight would find the correct path. But in outlining, I’m having to use all sorts of techniques stolen from the theater – the three-act structure, internal versus external challenges, ensuring that character is revealed through action, explicitly raising the stakes with every chapter – and that’s a sweaty workout.
I’m learning so many new things that I feel revitalized. This novel doesn’t feel like a slog any more, but a mountain to be climbed. It’s tough, but there’s a certain masochistic satisfaction I’m deriving, a brisk slap to the face.
To which I say to you, dear readers, is that there are mundane failures and exciting ones. The mundane failures you can’t learn from, you just did the same thing all over again. But the exciting ones are the ones where you can break yourself and then reforge your shattered forearms into adamantium claw-laden superpowers.
What I encourage you to do is to fail big. Write to the edge of your limits. And when you realize you can’t pull off this tricky story you’re halfway through, don’t get depressed; take it as a sign that you’re recognizing flaws even if you don’t know how to correct them yet. Writing’s full of invisible pitfalls where you think it’s brilliant, but your readers are unsatisfied. Just understanding that something doesn’t work is a major accomplishment, one you should congratulate yourself for.
What’s important is not this story. It’s your overall skill level. And a failed story can teach you far more than that easy sale.
Today, I’m taking the first step in spending at least a month outlining my novel chapter by chapter. Maybe it won’t work. But I’ll learn, and if this collapses then it’ll be such a glorious failure that I’ll be harvesting new talent from the ruins. Celebrate with me, people. Go blast a story of your own.
Pay My Wife To Be Crazy. Er. And Help People.
If you haven’t been paying attention, my wife Gini has committed herself to a mad project: riding 150 miles in two days to help fight Multiple Sclerosis. She’s doing this because of her grandfather – read her touching essay on the topic – and because a friend of ours in town, Patti, has MS.
I wish you all could meet Patti, and if you live in Cleveland, you probably have. Patti’s one of the sunniest, wittiest, cleverest women around, so much so that you occasionally have to remind yourself, “Oh, right, she has a disease that is stripping the motor functions from her body.” She has good days and bad days, but retains her sense of humor. Amazon.com once issued me an email that said, “People who liked [GINI JUDD] also liked [PATTI].”
As a way to fight this evil, Patti’s husband Mike has created the “Patti’s Paladins” biking group, which pedals out to a lighthouse once a year in a gruelling display of physical fitness. Well, it’s not that hard for Mike, who is so fit that they literally had to give him amphetamines before surgery because his resting heart rate is below what a normal human’s heart rate is while sedated. This, I believe, officially makes Mike a superhero.
Gini, however, was starting from scratch. She wants to do this. She’s been getting on her bike every day, pushing herself so hard she trembles the next day, reporting in: “Ten miles.” “Fifteen miles.” “Twenty, but I had to take a break.” She’s up to forty-one miles, a three-and-a-half-hour sweatfest that left her wrecked, but she is determined to make it to the lighthouse. For Patti. For herself. For all other sufferers of MS.
What she needs is sponsors. Many, many sponsors. As she says, “10 cents a mile is only $15 out of your pocket for 150 miles of my effort. Of course a dollar a mile would be quite lovely, but any pledge is money going straight to an important and worthy cause.” So I would strongly request, if you can, to give some cash to my wife, who is straining her healthy legs and lungs and heart for those whose legs and lungs and hearts are slowly deteriorating.
It’s a good cause. Help her, audience. You’re her only hope.