beehammer | Entries tagged with fiction

So, my sideline in original fiction is one of those almost but not quite things where I get just enough success to keep gamely plowing along with it but never enough to feel like I'm exactly making progress. Which is fine, because that's, I mean, not precisely what you'd expect from a personal decision to write whatever the fuck you want and try to sell it after the fact instead of trying to cater to the current market, but pretty fucking close to what you'd expect from that philosophy.

But it also means I get a lot of emails back from editors that boil down to "Your writing is tits but I asked myself 'what the fuuuuuuuuuuck' three separate times while reading this, so just, you know, keep us in mind if you ever feel like writing something another human being could relate to without being high on something."

All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that Jo Walton's writing feels like this personally-tailored punishment for all the times I've looked at a piece and said, "Fuck it, the slush readers've seen worse."

Walton writes really well, and the craft is there, and the structure is there, and then everything about the characters and the plot leaves me going "Surely something has to happen soon, right?"

Almost 200 pages into Lent. That's when something finally fucking happens. I keep getting sucked in with the prose and the promise of more and then it's like, "Nope! This is a 340-page treatise about obscure Platonic philosophy, which you loathe with a passion, roughly disguised as a novel!" and I fall for it every. fucking. time.

So basically I regret every minute I spent reading Lent and also recognize that it's some spitefully profound commentary on both my entire relationship to Walton's body of work as well as my entire relationship with the genre-lit world, which manages to bump the regret into active resentment. It's like the novel as performance art piece, and I don't know what to do with it except yell "What the fuuuuuuuuuuck?" at the heavens.

I decided to give tracking my actual writing numbers a whirl for the year.

It's especially easy when you're going the traditional publishing route to get very discouraged and feel like you're not accomplishing anything, because publishers seem to really like just... not responding in a timely fashion, about anything, ever. So you'll spend all week submitting things and feeling great, and then three months later you've barely got anything more than receipt confirmation emails to show for it, and it sometimes translates into this sensation of having done nothing all summer.

So for January, I managed: 2 completed works of fiction and 30,492 words. I submitted to 6 different places, received 5 rejections and 1 rewrite request from projects sent out last year, and sent out 2 as-yet unanswered queries.

Not a bad month's work.

(archived from tumblr)

There’s this feeling you get when a story gives you exactly the sort of satisfaction you’ve been hoping for but not quite expecting out of it. Kind of like sliding from cold tiles into a warm bath, or flipping the pillow over to the cool side when it’s ninety out and all the sheets are sticking to you.

Edward Wilson tells, in Letters to a Young Scientist, of an experiment performed to figure out how ants tell when another ant has shuffed off its mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. He starts with the hypothesis that the ants are reacting to the smell of decay coming from their dead sisters, because ants can hardly see when they’re down in the dark of their mounds, and for all they know that unmoving ant they’re crawling over is just being very lazy. It also takes a day or two postmortem for the removal process to kick in, so Wilson seemed reasonably sure that testing this mechanism would bear fruit.

He did some research, got a bunch of the chemicals typically present in decaying insects together, and started dabbing them on paper ant-substitutes to see which ones were treated more or less the same way a real dead ant would be. Some provoked no reaction, some threw the entire colony into an alarmed frenzy, and eventually one proved to have the exact correct response.

Thus it was that he found that once an ant has decomposed to the point that oleic acid is present in detectable quantities, the other ants will pick it up and remove it from the nest like the garbage it’s become. Ants are not, by nature, terribly sentimental creatures. They are, in fact, mostly just terrible.

So, mystery solved, right?

Except.

(It may have occurred to you as I was relating this. It may not have, too, and that’s fine. Let’s agree not to judge each other.)

What happens when you dab a little bit of that same acid on an ant that’s perfectly fine? What will her sisters do then?

Raise the sort of ant-ruckus rarely seen without the presence of a magnifying glass, because it’s the zombiepocalypse and why didn’t they listen to the old queen when she tried to warn them? Ignore her, because she’s behaving like a live thing and working away at colony business? Ignore her, because she’s moving and it’s only stationary objects that get this sort of treatment? Ignore her while she tries to wriggle away from them and go back to work as they carry her out to the ant graveyard?

(There are ants that live in plant-provided nests which sacrifice their dead to feed the god-thing that sustains them. There are spiders that war with them.)

These are the sort of things you think of, when a scientist tells a story about making ant-corpses out of paper.

But then sometimes the scientist goes on to say, “And of course, we wondered, what would happen if...?” and you get your answer.

Because this person, this person doing this thing across the gulf of decades reaches out, and says “I did this. This thing you wanted to do, this thing you wondered about, of course I did it, of course I wondered too.”

What happens, when a perfectly fine, perfectly live ant is doused with oleic acid, is that the ant is picked up, kicking and protesting, and carried to the graveyard, and left there. And when she gets up and, having no cause to believe herself dead, tries to go back home, some enterprising ant does the same thing. Again and again, with no sign of fatigue or alarm. She lives in the cemetery until a good cleaning miraculously resurrects her.

(archived from tumblr)

A friend recommended an article recently (here, if anyone’s interested), and it basically broke down why getting comfortable with feeling stupid is an absolute necessity for doing science.

But it hit me, as I was reading it, that most of what he was saying is absolutely true for writing, too.

You spend most of your formative years being rewarded for, let’s face it, fairly pedestrian, rule-following work. The smart money’s on not taking big risks; you might not get an A for your solid-but-forgettable short story or essay, but you definitely won’t fail the assignment. Most teachers and most professors, especially if you went to a large school with a high student to instructor ratio, are not out there encouraging students to go wild with graded assignments, and they don’t have the time to talk about what worked and what didn’t with all hundred and fifty of you even if they do encourage it. At best, you’re discussing it in peer groups full of young writers just as in the weeds about this stuff as you are.

In this environment, there’s a point at which you’re done with the piece, at which it’s no longer your problem, at which some authority will look at it and assign it a concrete score and tell you how well or how poorly you’ve done on it. These points are usually marked on a calendar, predictable and rational. There can be a certain amount of comfort in that at the same time that it can be suffocating or restricting. Even if you don’t like the outcome, you know where you stand. You can argue with a bad grade or resolve to do better next time.

When you’re writing for yourself and an actual audience--people who aren’t earning class-participation points for this--the rules are very different. Case in point, there aren’t really “rules.” There aren’t any directions. Nobody’s getting paid to read what you write from start to finish. You can do whatever the fuck you want, but nobody has to come up with a cogent reason for why they didn’t like it, or where you lost them. The only criteria is whether or not it works, which you’re only going to figure out by trying and succeeding or failing. And if you fail, you’re going to have to muddle through why that happened if you want to fix it.

Not to say that every writer’s an island, and we’re all in this alone. Of course we’re not. If you can get an audience, sometimes they’ll be kind enough to talk to you about how they felt about the piece in a coherent, helpful way. Critique groups and long-suffering friends and reading buddies are life-savers who can frequently tell you where your project stopped working, and sometimes even why. But the only person who can really fix your piece is you.

And, as with anything else worth doing, there’s never going to be a point where you can stop growing and go “I have reached the pinnacle of my potential and am now free to rest on my laurels forever.” You’ve figured out how to achieve various moods and communicate exactly what you want and do dialogue and nail plot structure and suck an audience in and subvert genre conventions satisfyingly instead of with great irritation? Great! There’s always going to be something else you want to try and some other thing that you always get hung up on. Always. You’re never going to look at your own work and just be happy.

Some of that’s because developing an eye for what’s good and what you want out of your own work is far, far easier and faster than developing the chops to put it into practice. It’s like building something: it’s simple to look at an off-kilter, unsound structure and go “Pretty sure that’s not supposed to be happening” but complicated to pick out on the blueprints exactly where the architect went wrong. We know our stories have gone off the rails before we develop the skills to keep it from happening, and that’s discouraging, to put it mildly.

But another big part of it is that you’re evolving as a person at the same time that you’re evolving as a writer. The questions you’re asking yourself at twenty aren’t the same questions you’re asking yourself at forty or seventy. The genres you’re working in or interested in or influenced by will be evolving, too. So will the world around you.

The sooner a writer can get comfortable with the idea that not everything has to be good, or great, or consistent, or effective, or any number of five million other things that our writing can frustratingly resist being, the sooner we can get comfortable with the process of working toward eventual success.

(archived from tumblr)

I just want to see one of those dopey supervillain team-up things where instead of everybody being like “All right, time to fight us some heroes!”, every last one of them has an existential crisis because somebody lumped them in with the rest of these fucks.

Dr. Doom’s all “Doom will usher in a new age, a golden utopia, free from the burden of want or indecision or petty dissent! Doom knows what’s best for mankind and will bring it about! These peasants are mere jailbreakers and thieves! How has it come to be that Doom is numbered among their ranks!”

And like Sandman’s sitting there going “Dude, I just... I steal shit. Sometimes I team up with guys who also don’t like Spider-Man. Worst thing I ever did was slap an old dude, and I felt really bad about it for weeks. That guy’s been sanctioned by the UN three times and counting for running death camps.”

“The skulls of Doom’s enemies pave the road to a better tomorrow!”

Three guys’ve got their hands up like “We literally just fight the Avengers for kicks. Pretty sure that ain’t even illegal.”

General Ross is sitting there glaring at everyone and going “I’m still a general. I work for the US government. I’m being paid, right now, out of taxpayer funds. You’re all going to super-jail as soon as I get my phone back.”

Everybody’s side-eyeing Kraven like, it’s 2016, bro, stop killing endangered animals for fun, and he’s looking at them like he doesn’t even know what to say to someone if it’s not about hunting.

Wolverine and Deadpool are somewhere in the back, bickering with one of the roster-guys about how it shouldn’t count if the hundreds of dudes you’ve knife-murdered were knife-murdered for good reasons.

It’s just the most demoralizing thing since Osborn got elected president. Super-crime plummets 50% in the next three months as everyone takes some time to reflect on their lives and try to get their shit together.

(archived from tumblr)

It’s been like a week and I’m still chuckling to myself over Gone Girl. (The book. Haven’t seen the movie.) It’s just so, so good.

I read an essay once–I forget where, it was in an anthology about horror movies–that posited that horror of the intimate, single-protagonist sort really only worked on an emotional level if there was some initial sin or bad act on the protagonist’s part that provoked the (horrific, disproportionate) response of the antagonist. They have to have done something, to have some reprisal coming, in order for the story to work. Otherwise it’s basically just a martyrdom playing out on screen for two hours, or over the course of two hundred pages.

It’s not a bad theory, I don’t think, and it’s helped explain the dissatisfaction of a few movies where the protagonist’s fuck-up is really…not that big a deal? Like Club Dread*, where the murderer is like “You said you didn’t have any pot, but you totally did! And you! You didn’t say ‘bless you’ after I sneezed!”, only it’s not horror-comedy, and you’re expected to take it seriously. Without a real transgression, a film hitting beats the seem to imply some level of guilt or comeuppance just comes off as weird and sadistic.

If you’ve seen it, Drag Me to Hell** is a good example of when it works. You tell an old-old, poverty-stricken lady she’s getting foreclosed on because you work for a soulless bank when all human decency tells you to let the poor old bat die in her own home in peace, well. You haven’t earned getting damned to hell, obviously, but you’ve done something concrete and reasonably infuriating to provoke the witch who curses you. It’s a struggle that makes sense. You, Protagonist McGee, are righteously indignant because Jesus Christ, this is an over-the-top response, and fighting like mad because you don’t deserve this, and Antagonist McBastard is over there going “You foreclosed on a dying ninety-year-old! Fuck you, you’re going to hell!”.

So, what did Nick do to deserve his fate in Gone Girl? I mean, Amy’s pretty other than else in the book. She’s pretty much Moriarty, if Moriarty were motivated by spite and not profit. But she’s also an absolutely perfect disaster to befall a man who wants, and spends much of his life pursuing, a shallow fantasy of women as toys, women who exist only to dispense comfort and pleasure, women who have no uncomfortable needs or personalities or demands to inconvenience him.

Of the three main female characters–Amy, Andie, and Go–Go is the only one who’s a real person. Nick’s twin sister is the woman he can’t leave, even if their relationship hits the skids or sours, and so she gets to be a human. Andie exists in the same twilight zone where he wishes Amy lived, where she’s sexually and emotionally available and needs nothing in return that he can’t easily give her and is automatically subordinate in the relationship thanks to the huge gap in age and status (over a decade apart; she’s a college student and he’s her professor). So what happens when Nick breaks the marriage contract and cheats on Amy with Andie?

What happens is that it turns out that Nick, who wants nothing more than to be married to a pleasant little doll who will never give him any trouble, has married the woman that every casual misogynist tells ghost stories about. As punishment for his pursuit of the puerile daydream that requires real people to act as props, he gets the vindictive monster inspired by centuries of lingering guilt over the unacknowledged unfairness of the demand that women act like toys.

I mean, let’s be clear: Amy is not a real person. In the function of this story, Amy is the monster. And Amy-the-monster is epic. Amy’s wrath knows few bounds. Amy will murder you because you make her act grateful one too many times. Amy will have a baby just to trap you. Amy will have sex with you just to say it was rape. Amy will make you fall in love with her all over again just to throw it in your face. Amy will work and work and work at something and never let on and then act as if everything she accomplished was effortless, because Amy is unknowable and omnipotent and consequently bordering on magical. Are we even sure Amy had to work at it? Of course not, because fuck if Nick was paying attention. Amy can snap her fingers and turn seven years of your life into a lie. Amy will tell the whole world about your flaws, and she can do it because you let her see the real you. Amy is every gangrenous fear of intimacy ever spawned come to life and given reason to be angry at a man, and when Nick cheats, he pulls the trigger.

And in the end, the monster wins. Nick rolls over and accepts it, and tries to spin Amy as a stabilizing, maturing force, a fire-and-brimstone god who will make him toe the line and be a good man–the good man he couldn’t manage to be under his own power–even as Go tells him that this is fucked up and terrible. Of course, what Go fails to understand is that Nick has come to the realization that he doesn’t want a real woman, a real human being of flesh and blood and frailties and needs. A real woman would be boring. The idea of being in a real relationship with a real woman still holds no appeal. Amy-the-monster has taken away Nick’s expectation of the blow-up doll, but in its place he’s latched onto the expectation of the vampire. If he can’t have the comfort of an infinitely-soothing caregiver, he needs the horror of an infinitely-terrible tyrant.

*Actually a reasonably good movie?

**Also a reasonably good movie, and one of the few I’ve seen (not usually a big horror fan, so this might not be unusual) where a female protagonist gets to play kind of cocky and brash in response to supernatural aggression without getting shoved into the vapid-slut role. Christine basically gets to be Ash.

I'm doing some final work cleaning up a fic before asking if anyone wants to beta it, and part of my process for this stage is running a piece through a text analyzer just to catch any unusual repetitive vocabulary. This time around it, because it's a Christmas fic and revolves around holiday things, it looks like the little bot that runs it is having an aneurysm or trying to write a poem.