Every Breath You Take

Beth Keegan’s story “Mr Bliss” is a good example of how an extended character portrait can develop into story. The portrait is edgy with desire and eventually it takes hold within Mr. Bliss: “He did want. He could want. She couldn't take that away.” And that is when he does something besides observe. That is when the story happens, just before the end. Plenty of stunning descriptive language here, nuanced by obsession.

An Absurdist Smokescreen

With her multiple prize-winning story “Cavemen in the Hedges” Stacey Richter puts creative into creative writing. The story is in the T. Corgahessan Boyle school of absurdo-realism. This is not as difficult a formula as the brilliance of the story might make it seem. It’s basically a realistic relationship story overlaid with the absurd premise of the returning Neanderthals. The only non-realistic element in the story is the Neanderthals. Even the way that people are described as reacting to the Neanderthals is realistic: they act the way they would to the invasion of any pest. This normalcy is part of the story’s allure. Leaving aside the Neanderthals for a moment, the story’s arc is the coming apart of the relationship after the narrator refuses to marry Kim. The story is about the dynamics of that relationship. The cavemen are a smokescreen because the story isn’t about them. They are no mere landscaping, however, as they become the catalyst which causes Kim to pull the eject handle on the relationship. This could have been a good story just on the strength of that story arc alone. What makes it great is the leap into absurdism. A leap that doesn’t lose touch with reality, thus making the message more poignant. This also could have been a good science fiction story if Richter had departed further from realism. It’s that tension between realism and science fiction that gives the story it’s juice. Although I won’t comment on it, a good critical essay lurks in the compare between the man Kim left and the Neanderthal she played with, another embedded thematic element that gives the story some added juice.

Beware the Intentional Fallacy

In honor of today being the first anniversary of the Storyglossia Weblog, I decided to blog one of my own stories. “My Summer Vacation” was originally published in Carve, but I’ve linked to an easier to read version tucked away on the Storyglossia site. Wary of the intentional fallacy—that authors actually know what’s going on in their own work—I’ll steer clear of a couple of the more interesting devices in this story (the use of the Learning Annex catalog and the movie Falling Down) and focus instead on three scene snippets that were consciously inserted into the final draft. These inserts came in response to comments made by a writing teacher who suggested that Paul’s stroll along Venice Beach occurred too much in his head. The suggestion was to have Paul awkwardly interact with a family (one that mirrored his own) so that his isolation would be dramatized. I don’t remember why I chose not to use that exact suggestion (see, there’s that intentional fallacy in action) but I do know why I chose to write the two Venice Beach scene fragments I did: because they highlighted his awkwardness with women, which becomes a theme throughout the catalog section. My thought was to show his awkwardness first, so that when he’s contemplating the classes in the catalog you've already seen that he needs help. The first snippet suggests his fear of interaction:

A girl wearing psychedelic bell-bottoms and a fringed buckskin jacket like she’s still in the 60’s is playing guitar and singing Dylan’s "Tangled up in Blue" and I stop to listen to her. She locks her eyes on mine as she finishes up the verse.
   —Can I play you a song?
   I shake my head.
   —I’ll play you anything you want for a dollar, she says and leans towards me wafting alcohol and sweat.
   —No thanks.
   —How about a blow-job then? Twenty five bucks and I’ll play your skin flute.
   I back away from her and turn into the crowd.
   —Chicken! she yells after me and starts making clucking noises. The crowd around her starts laughing and I shove through and away from them.

So he’s threatened by what should be a non-threatening situation. The second snippet was aimed at his ineptness:

I hear the sound of skates and look over my shoulder. A cute blonde in jeans shorts and yellow-bikini top skates up the railing next to me. She stands there looking out at the water. She catches me staring and embarrassed I blurt out:
   —Hi, do you skate here a lot?
   —Yeah, she says and looks away.
   —Live nearby?
   She sniffs and gives me a disgusted look.
   —Well, you could be from out of town, here on business or something.
   —Like you? Forget the pick-up lines, she says and pushes away from the railing, skating backwards. I’m not into men.
   She starts laughing, then pivots and cruises off down the pier.

Notice that both of these scenes end with him being laughed at. This seems a bit on the nose to me now (under this kind of scrutiny) but at the time it seemed a good way to show some minor humiliation and to seek reader sympathy. And that’s a key point. The character is a young millionaire. How do you get sympathy for such a character? I tried to show that despite all those stock options, he was isolated and lonely and living a life not many would want. Having written those two scene snippets for his Venice Beach stroll, I decided to add something similar to the beginning of the story:

A ruckus is building in the hall and I look in the rear-view mirror stuck to the top left corner of my monitor. It’s aimed at the doorway of my office. I can’t see anyone but I can hear them talking about going to see a movie over at the Cineplex. Might be just what I need. And then I hear:
   —Should we ask Paul?
   —What for? He’s never gone before.
   —There’s already five of us. The car’s full.
   —Okay, let’s book.
   As I watch in the mirror they flash by the office door and then are gone down the hallway, laughter echoing. I swivel my chair around, stare at my mountain bike propped between the futon and the desk. I don’t even have a car—I still bike the four blocks to work. I kick at the bike tire but miss and wedge my sneaker between the spokes. Jerking my foot back I kick the tire so hard it bangs back and forth against the futon and desk.

I wanted to show him isolated at work, too. Here he’s being left out, partly because of his own prior behavior. Also, I wanted to show a hint of change, plus the anger at missing out. Notice the laughter again, although in this instance it’s ambiguous whether it’s directed at him. I inserted the laughter here to foreshadow the laughter in the two later scenes (exactly the kind of crafty thing you can do on revision).
 
Much of the rest of the story came about in the haphazard and unintentional way that stories happen—although trying to show the emptiness within a young millionaire programmer toiling away at a software giant was always the goal—but the three scene snippets above were all consciously crafted and inserted to put more show into the story’s final draft.