On Saturday I got my fourth rejection for the crazy robot story. It was returned even before two weeks had passed. In the case of this magazine, which ought to have a frustratingly slow reading process as befits its venerable reputation, and which is on the opposite coast, this speedy postal no is pretty embarrassing. A slush reader at a prominent genre magazine and a reader I like and trust a great deal both told me I should have no trouble placing this story, but I am having trouble. And I have this theory about why.
I wish I could remember the source of this insight, but at some point in the couple of years after college, I heard that most fledgling filmmakers make their first movie about a killer. Hollywood, scouting for new directors, does not want to see film-school shorts about serial killers, because they see too many of them. (I think it's kind of like "it was all a dream" to end a story - oh, honey, no.) I was startled, because indeed, the final short film I made in my senior-year production class was about a killer. Had I so little imagination?
Making mediocre movies about killers is easy, I guess. Not only can you truck in cliches and superlatives, but the stakes are automatically high. How many will die? Will s/he get caught, or escape? Creating tension in such a situation is hardly difficult.
The crazy robot story - spoilers - ends up with the crazy robot becoming a killer of humans, because he, uh, goes crazy. His madness is about exclusion from being human, and since the character thinks in terms of inferiority and superiority, he decides that (certain) humans are inferior and don't deserve to live. I'm proud of the killin' climax of the story, I truly am, but the thing I'm beginning to wonder is if I need to take the murder out of it. Because isn't it just another killer story? A situation where I've inflated the stakes to make things easy on me, rather than taking the hard way in and evoking the robot's struggle without such all-or-nothing tension?
Killing and other grievous harm happens pretty often in my stories, but until now I haven't considered in detail whether this is a matter of laziness rather than affinity. Perhaps I should be assembling plots with purposely lower stakes, stories that create interesting conflicts without the glitz of murder. But murder interests me. Serial killers interest me. Not because they're easy to write about (the good ones aren't), but because I find them alien and fascinating. A lot more fascinating than writer-main characters who can't seem to bed the girl or frustrated Flaubert-reading housewives dreamed up by male MFA grads.
Like anything else in writing, you can probably do whatever you want as long as you do it really goddamn well. But I imagine a lot of slush readers would pick up my crazy robot story and say, no matter its quality, oh jeez, another dang killer story, haven't we had enough of these? And that makes me wonder if I should just steer away from what actually interests me, challenge myself by writing about small quiet conflicts instead. Hopefully I wouldn't be doing this to write to the market, but instead to push myself in new directions. Those subjects just sound so stale, so inert, compared to what I most enjoy.
What do you think? Can "it was all a dream" stories work if they're that good? Are serial killers too commonplace, too easy, for a medium-good writer like me to try and pass them off?
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Revising (Like a Boss)
Yesterday I gave up entirely on the idea that I could work productively, meet my teaching responsibilities, meet my interpersonal responsibilities, and still find large chunks of time to revise the horror novel. I did $16 worth of contracting work (I try to do $80-$100 per day normally), and after lunch I plunked on the couch and put on Joanna Newsom and dug in.
I wrote a good book. I'd like to qualify that with "I think", but it would be false humility. I'm sure I wrote a good book. It took me 6+ hours to get through it completely, keeping in mind the one big piece of feedback Matt gave me as well as the few smaller ones, and at the end of it I was dazed and optimistic. I really have faith in this one; I remember a great deal more uncertainty about the Greenland book than I have here. I'm planning to take today and implement the revisions I found I need to make, possibly spilling over into Friday. After I sleep on the revisions, I'll take some time this weekend to reformat it, send the PDF to Lulu, and have it printed. Then the few of you who've enlisted will start getting copies in the mail.
I had started to feel, yesterday, as if the book's progress was slipping away, and I was forgetting that this is the work, this is the important stuff. Work for money is required, but to go back to thinking that it's not the important work of my life is not something I want to do. That attitude is in the past, I'm finished with it.
I do need some help with the first paragraph. Matt suggested that I reorder the sentences in the paragraph to put the stuff with the emotional punch first, and I edited and read it over both ways and I just can't decide. I like locating the punch at the end, and the first sentence was one of those poof inspirations so I hate to move it, but I can't shake the feeling that he might be correct. It's the first paragraph, the first sentences of the book, so out of everything in the not-quite-90,000 words, it needs to be the most perfect. I'll excerpt it and embed a poll below, so you can tell me which you like better. (I won't say which is which.)
And now, to revisions.
Version 1:
There was a picture on the bureau that Elaine never looked at. She left it turned at an angle, so the light through the blinds bounced off the glass obliquely, and there was no way for her to look at Lucy's eight-year-old smile unless she picked up the frame and wiped the dust off of it and looked. She kept it on the bureau because she was sure it was the right thing to do, because the little red-haired girl in the picture had been her sister. But Elaine didn't want to think about Lucy, didn't want to acknowledge the coming and then going of Lucy even in quick glances as she got ready for work. So she never did.
Version 2:
There was a picture on the bureau that Elaine never looked at. She kept it there because she was sure it was the right thing to do, because the little red-haired girl in the picture had been her sister. But she didn't want to think about Lucy, didn't want to acknowledge the coming and then going of Lucy even in quick glances as she got ready for work. So she left the picture turned at an angle, so the light through the blinds bounced off the glass obliquely, and there was no way for her to look at Lucy's eight-year-old smile unless she picked up the frame and wiped the dust off of it and looked. And she never did.
I wrote a good book. I'd like to qualify that with "I think", but it would be false humility. I'm sure I wrote a good book. It took me 6+ hours to get through it completely, keeping in mind the one big piece of feedback Matt gave me as well as the few smaller ones, and at the end of it I was dazed and optimistic. I really have faith in this one; I remember a great deal more uncertainty about the Greenland book than I have here. I'm planning to take today and implement the revisions I found I need to make, possibly spilling over into Friday. After I sleep on the revisions, I'll take some time this weekend to reformat it, send the PDF to Lulu, and have it printed. Then the few of you who've enlisted will start getting copies in the mail.
I had started to feel, yesterday, as if the book's progress was slipping away, and I was forgetting that this is the work, this is the important stuff. Work for money is required, but to go back to thinking that it's not the important work of my life is not something I want to do. That attitude is in the past, I'm finished with it.
I do need some help with the first paragraph. Matt suggested that I reorder the sentences in the paragraph to put the stuff with the emotional punch first, and I edited and read it over both ways and I just can't decide. I like locating the punch at the end, and the first sentence was one of those poof inspirations so I hate to move it, but I can't shake the feeling that he might be correct. It's the first paragraph, the first sentences of the book, so out of everything in the not-quite-90,000 words, it needs to be the most perfect. I'll excerpt it and embed a poll below, so you can tell me which you like better. (I won't say which is which.)
And now, to revisions.
Version 1:
There was a picture on the bureau that Elaine never looked at. She left it turned at an angle, so the light through the blinds bounced off the glass obliquely, and there was no way for her to look at Lucy's eight-year-old smile unless she picked up the frame and wiped the dust off of it and looked. She kept it on the bureau because she was sure it was the right thing to do, because the little red-haired girl in the picture had been her sister. But Elaine didn't want to think about Lucy, didn't want to acknowledge the coming and then going of Lucy even in quick glances as she got ready for work. So she never did.
Version 2:
There was a picture on the bureau that Elaine never looked at. She kept it there because she was sure it was the right thing to do, because the little red-haired girl in the picture had been her sister. But she didn't want to think about Lucy, didn't want to acknowledge the coming and then going of Lucy even in quick glances as she got ready for work. So she left the picture turned at an angle, so the light through the blinds bounced off the glass obliquely, and there was no way for her to look at Lucy's eight-year-old smile unless she picked up the frame and wiped the dust off of it and looked. And she never did.
Which one do you prefer?
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Things Are Happening
Yesterday I started work on a story at about 1:00, and although I took time off in between to eat, watch pieces of Office Space, go to yoga class, and fuck around on the internet, I was still working at about 9:30. I'm not very happy that it took me so many hours to produce 4,000 words in draft form, but I guess it's better than producing nothing at all. I'm kind of beating my fists against the ending, and wondering whether the framing device will or should hold up, and I feel like there's something else I have to say in the story, on the tip of my tongue, and can't quite get it out. I think I need a few days or weeks to let it rest before cutting it open again.
I have been given the gift of a week to do nothing but write, and although I'm nervous about the source of the gift, it's still overwhelmingly a good thing. Today is the day I need to get down to business at it, so as not to waste the gift, and I've already procrastinated away two hours on Jon Stewart and Slate and, now, this blog. I have something to do at 1:00 that will take an indeterminate amount of time, and I'm pretty sure I'm just going to take a book with me instead of my laptop - that would be really pretentious, right? - but if I can't get the machine clanking away between now and then, I might compromise and take a notebook. There are always more characters and storylines to be brainstormed, always more Luquenora words to be conjured up.
I've mentioned before that it bothers me how I tend to get excited about certain things in my life, effuse about them to others, and then have to downplay that excitement when my life takes a turn in another direction. In the last few months I've made a concerted effort to change this. Because there's no changing the dilettantish aspect, I've just started to shut my damn mouth about things, tried hard not to blurt out everything going on for me to everyone who asks. This isn't particularly hard, but I think it adds to the general theme of standoffishness that colors much of my interaction with the world of late. I'm in a position of not having to consider this standoffishness a problem for the immediate future - a blessing - but for a long time now it has been one.
In the last couple of weeks a lot of things have happened that, on my old anonymous blog, I would have burst forth about in great geysers of melodramatic prose. But the situation is still enough in flux that I'm embarrassed to say anything, really, only to have to retract it in a few days when I have more information. I don't think anyone would blame me for the uncertainty or the change-and-change-again aspect of this information, because it's all external, not me being flaky. But I'd rather just say nothing until I know more.
At this point I feel like I'm being deliberately cryptic, but I think that's a jerky thing to do on blogs, so I assure you I'm not. I'd rather tell you that I feel muzzled than write short posts that don't hint anything is happening at all. THINGS ARE HAPPENING. They're just not happening with consistency or speed or transparency.
Transparency would be nice, actually. In a couple of weeks, when all of this uncertainty passes, that's going to be my keyword for this blog.
Something I want to tell everybody but I'm afraid to, because they'll judge me for taking such an action when I am not actually working at a paying job: I bought a new laptop. I am still mourning about it a little because I needed a new one and just plain couldn't afford a Mac. So I bought an HP with Windows 7 for, including the cost of Office software and after rebates et al, just under $500. Less than half as much as a comparable Mac.
And I really like this one. It's got everything I need and some extra bells and whistles besides. I'm sorry, Apple Gods! I wanted to buy my third Mac laptop. I just couldn't manage it right now. And for various (legitimate!) reasons, I needed a new laptop.
Plus, it's shiny.
OKAY that's enough procrastination. Off I go into the wild.
I have been given the gift of a week to do nothing but write, and although I'm nervous about the source of the gift, it's still overwhelmingly a good thing. Today is the day I need to get down to business at it, so as not to waste the gift, and I've already procrastinated away two hours on Jon Stewart and Slate and, now, this blog. I have something to do at 1:00 that will take an indeterminate amount of time, and I'm pretty sure I'm just going to take a book with me instead of my laptop - that would be really pretentious, right? - but if I can't get the machine clanking away between now and then, I might compromise and take a notebook. There are always more characters and storylines to be brainstormed, always more Luquenora words to be conjured up.
I've mentioned before that it bothers me how I tend to get excited about certain things in my life, effuse about them to others, and then have to downplay that excitement when my life takes a turn in another direction. In the last few months I've made a concerted effort to change this. Because there's no changing the dilettantish aspect, I've just started to shut my damn mouth about things, tried hard not to blurt out everything going on for me to everyone who asks. This isn't particularly hard, but I think it adds to the general theme of standoffishness that colors much of my interaction with the world of late. I'm in a position of not having to consider this standoffishness a problem for the immediate future - a blessing - but for a long time now it has been one.
In the last couple of weeks a lot of things have happened that, on my old anonymous blog, I would have burst forth about in great geysers of melodramatic prose. But the situation is still enough in flux that I'm embarrassed to say anything, really, only to have to retract it in a few days when I have more information. I don't think anyone would blame me for the uncertainty or the change-and-change-again aspect of this information, because it's all external, not me being flaky. But I'd rather just say nothing until I know more.
At this point I feel like I'm being deliberately cryptic, but I think that's a jerky thing to do on blogs, so I assure you I'm not. I'd rather tell you that I feel muzzled than write short posts that don't hint anything is happening at all. THINGS ARE HAPPENING. They're just not happening with consistency or speed or transparency.
Transparency would be nice, actually. In a couple of weeks, when all of this uncertainty passes, that's going to be my keyword for this blog.
Something I want to tell everybody but I'm afraid to, because they'll judge me for taking such an action when I am not actually working at a paying job: I bought a new laptop. I am still mourning about it a little because I needed a new one and just plain couldn't afford a Mac. So I bought an HP with Windows 7 for, including the cost of Office software and after rebates et al, just under $500. Less than half as much as a comparable Mac.
And I really like this one. It's got everything I need and some extra bells and whistles besides. I'm sorry, Apple Gods! I wanted to buy my third Mac laptop. I just couldn't manage it right now. And for various (legitimate!) reasons, I needed a new laptop.
Plus, it's shiny.
OKAY that's enough procrastination. Off I go into the wild.
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