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I just graduated from school, and I have a year to wait before I can go to grad school because I was lazy with my applications. I focused mostly on studying english literature and theory, but towards the end I started to move towards creative writing and (with the help of a good professor) ended up with a bunch of rough stories that I need to edit and an annoying habit of trying to write every day.
I'm intensely self conscious about my writing, which rules out trying to publish for now, but I figured sharing them anonymously through the internet might help me out in terms of polishing (as much as I hate the idea of the workshop) and getting comfortable.
I figured I'd start with a short one:
Thirty Seconds before the Earth Explodes, Marjorie, the Librarian
There was about thirty minutes left before the Earth exploded, and Marjorie was walking briskly to a table of rowdy youngsters in an attempt to either quiet them down, or to usher them out of the building. Marjorie was the head librarian, of average librarian height, average librarian stature, and had an averagely librarian distaste for ruckus, especially that ruckus caused by rowdy teenage boys, as well as any other number of average librarian stereotypes and mannerisms, like her horn-rimmed eyeglasses, or a propensity to gravitate towards romance novels, and kittens, although the definition kittens should probably, and often was, extended to include every member of the house-cat species, without discrimination of age, color, or sex.
The carpet flooring in the library what Marjorie thought was the pleasant tap-tap-tapping of her heels, which were not more than thirty seconds re-administered to her feet stealthily from underneath her disk, that made her feel as though she had substance, as though she took up actual space in the world, that reassured her that she was a real, corporeal person and not some ungraspable, intangible, incorporeal, if you will, ghost. It’s not as if they aren’t comfortable, Marjorie had thought to herself as she began slipping them off underneath her desk, it’s just not as if anyone will notice. Besides, she thought, they look nice and (this is getting back to the store where Marjorie is considering buying this shoes, which cost more than the average librarian should be spending on shoes) they look good, and they are my color, and she hardly ever treats herself anyway and (this is getting back to her apartment trying to decide whether she should be enjoying her gourmet microwave’d dinner- new, improved, 50% less cat hair- or live vicariously through her television) they look good and that’s that. Whatever justification Marjorie ended up using, it remained that Marjorie’s shoes were probably the only thing about her that was out the ordinary- not average, but above average, or at least slightly above average.
As she began her approach, she had already come up with at least five scalding lines that she could deliver in informing this boys, no, telling them off, that they need to either shape up or quiet down or get out of her life and this was a library for heaven’s sake and not a pool hall or a video arcade that you can just sit down and do whatever the hell you want, that this wasn’t the first, or the second, or even the third- when she rightfully should have thrown them out- or fourth time but more like the fifth or the sixth time and that This. Would. Be. Their. Final. Warning.
About halfway across the room Marjorie had already counted twenty-nine steps and was already practicing these lines. If someone were to have examined Marjorie’s head during these moments, they would be able to plot her confidence, Y, rising as she approaches that 29th step, but every subsequent step left her more, and more diminished until she arrived at that table, mostly unnoticed since the boys didn’t give her any bother, at the lowest point that it has been in all twenty-nine years of her life.
“Will you shush,” she shushed. Then she turned, and began the trek back to her desk.
It felt like it was a longer walk back to her desk than it was from her desk. Marjorie felt her cheeks flush- she was hot- hotter than she should be- it was as though she could hardly breathe. What is it, she wondered, that is different? What was it, she wondered, that has made her this way? What catastrophic event in the formative years of her childhood had rendered her unable to speak, unable to laugh, or to feel, or to function like any other normal human being. What’s wrong with me? Marjorie noticed that her fists were clenched, and her teeth gritted inside her mouth, and she began to take the familiar steps of slowly relaxing them, to slowly let all of her tension wash away, waves of relaxation slowly lapping at its cliff-
Marjorie was seventeen when she began to (seriously) consider suicide. Her life wasn’t bad- in fact her life was good- but there was something- a distance- between her and everyone else- a distance she couldn’t explain but that she could feel. She would gaze across that vast distance in her mind’s eye- an enormous sea of black, a bleak ocean of nothing- and she could get lose inside of it, lost in everyday life. She would feel overwhelmed, as though she were drowning, surrounded by all these people who could do and did things that she couldn’t, even simple things like carry a conversation or make someone smile, or even just make someone notice that she was there. All she wanted was to be human.
I wish I were prettier, she would think, I wish I didn’t have to wear glasses. She would wish that some parts of her were bigger, and others smaller. Marjorie would wish for all these things, wish that were a different person, wish that she could wake up from a coma one day and be somebody else, to live someone else’s life, just anything but be herself. Marjorie wished she could be happy, and she knew, she knew that if she had these things, that if she could be pretty and have a good smile that people would like her and that she would have everything in the world and that she would be happy.
Marjorie was seventeen was she first began to (seriously) consider suicide- to jump into that black pool and let it drag her underneath, completely, forever. She would stare into that void, that space between her and the rest of the world, and it was staring into that nothing and listening to her record player tell her that the Earth looks better from the stars, and the knife, the cold edge of the knife, the glint, from the window letting in the sun reflect off of it, that she found that she couldn’t do it. To drag that thing across her skin, to spill her life out, to render her conscious unconscious, to give up existing even though she already felt like she didn’t exist but I exist I exist I exist- she couldn’t- she wouldn’t- but she knew that merely this observation signaled a change, that it created in the universe a reaction in which there would be an equal and opposite reaction- and that by just seeing the sun glint off the knife, just by knowing that it existed meant something had to have changed and that nothing could ever go back to the way that it was. With the sun in her eyes, she knew that she had made the jump- that she had leaped off the cliff down into the black sea, but the clouds had a noose around her neck and instead of having the cool waters rush over her head, drag her down and make her one with it, that she would just hang there, powerless to move, powerless to take action, suspended in the air, kicking her legs, and her tongue slowly swelling, dangling from her mouth, and slowly, slowly, suffocating.
By the time Marjorie had made it back to her desk, she had already taken a deep breath of four and counted down from ten slowly. She had already spent the shortest eternity sitting on an empty, sunny beach sipping a cool drink with the breeze and waves rolling lazy in. Despite these efforts, that mountain of tension still remained- she hadn’t managed to get a hold of herself- it was as though she left a piece of herself at that table with those boys. As she looked from her desk at their table she could see it, like a ghost, laughing and playing. They did not see her there, they did not see that ghost sitting next to them but Marjorie could see her there, and Marjorie could feel that part of herself missing, like a puzzle of a heart with a piece missing. Marjorie tried looking somewhere else, to the other people in the library quietly searching, reading, like a kind of archaeological excavation, sifting through the dust, looking for lost treasures, remnants of bygone eras. She needed a walk, Marjorie decided, she needed to get away from this ocean of words before it swallowed her whole.
Outside the doors of the library, there is a woman talking on a telephone with a man. Who the man and woman are isn’t important- what is important is the conversation they are having.
“If you don’t tell me the truth then I am going to hang up this phone and I am never going to talk to you again, and you will never see me again and it will be over,” the woman told the phone. The voice on the other side was muffled, and she didn’t like the answer.
“No. No. No. No. Don’t give me that. Tell me the truth, right now, or I swear I am going to hang up the phone.”
Language is a grotesque animal. How razor thin are the lines that we create to walk across like a tightrope- how dangerous of terrain does it create, laying minefields for us to tread in our conversations. Language has built around the world a labyrinth- but it is impossible to tell the monster trapped inside of it. Who is trapped with who?
When the phone connection dies, how can anyone be sure that the person on the other line is still alive? Is there any evidence to say that when the connection is severed that the person on the other end isn’t killed along with it? Thus in the conversation with the man and woman, what either of them saying doesn’t matter, because it all just boils down to variations of I exist I exist I exist I-
Click. The connection is dead.
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It takes quite a bit of courage to share your writing with the world like this. I know lots of folks who love to write but are terrified of others seeing the work. I suppose I can understand the catharsis that accompanies the act of writing, but I think writing is meant to be shared!
This could use quite a bit of proofing (the technical aspects were a little rough occasionally, though that could just be first draft-itis), but having a story to share is the hardest part of writing, and you have that well taken care of. You can always clean up technically messy writing, but you can't fix a crappy story. You've got a good start!
EDIT: I am far from a literary critic, so I can't comment on the story itself. I primarily do editing for legal writing, so I'm familiar only with the technical aspects of writing, not the literary aspects of it. That probably explains why I think the "story" is much harder than the writing.
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I can't explain in detail why, but I didn't find this to be a good read. Don't know about the technical aspects and whatnot.. the story is just not working for me. What does anything have to do with the earth exploding? Are the youngsters just gonna do what they did 5 times already, just talking loudly and stuff, despite that the world is going to explode. Don't they have anything better to do like raping, or snorting coke and injecting heroin? Am I supposed to feel sad for the librarian that despite the fact that the world is exploding she can't make decent use of the English language and tell those buggers to stfu? I don't understand what you are trying to communicate, or provoke in a reader and it doesn't even confuse me, i just feel there's nothing to your story. I would love to hear an interpretation that opens my eyes and mind but I'm afraid I'm not going to.
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FF I think that's a really good response. I think that I did a pretty poor job in writing the story originally (which was about twice as long) and since it was one of my least favorite pieces it was the first that I decided to revise.
The story originally was about the inability for language to communicate effectively. After the conversation outside, it goes back into the library where marjorie and another character have a couple of fantasies, and then cuts back into the real world and the earth explodes. However, after reading them over, and thinking them over, I didn't think that they were good or effective, so I cut them out and kept it at this micro-length.
The boys and marjorie's ghost are intended to be a sort of faint echo of whitman's song of myself. It's not something that I did well, and while reading the story I read the poem a lot to try and improve it with no avail. Basically, we have marjorie sitting from her desk, looking towards the young boys and fantasizing, wishing she were there, but when she makes a move to approach them, she is unable to convey this sexuality or even anything in language.
the story is about this failure of communication, my main focus being marjories ghost, marjories shoes, the flashback, and the conversation outside.
I agree that there isn't much substance to the story, and that it's not really that much of a story. I tend to ignore the natural arc of the story and ignore plot and all kinds of traditional fiction stuff and I get really caught up in rambling inner dialogues which is mostly because I got started writing in a different medium that encourages a lot of this kind of stuff called bad poetry. I'm also a pretty poor writer technically, so what's left is this hot mess that perpetually looks like a first draft.
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I do as I always do when somebody posts a short story. I scroll down and check paragraph length. Seeing the long ones in this I skipped reading it, sorry.
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^because reading is hard, right? wordz n shit
as for you, sir, aiurz. is douglas adams an influence? from what i can remember of his stuff, this reminds me a lot of it.
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On July 27 2011 06:28 Binky1842 wrote:
^because reading is hard, right? wordz n shit
as for you, sir, aiurz. is douglas adams an influence? from what i can remember of his stuff, this reminds me a lot of it.
I do agree, the style is familiar to some extent. The story was very enjoyable to me, at least, even though there were some harsh spots where technical issues slowed me down but I usually dismiss that with the "English isn't my native language" excuse.
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matt: I haven't read any douglas adams. I'm not 100% sure but if I remember right the voice that I was channeling/had been reading/had heard read was john barth.
I've seen the movie and some of the tv show, and if I think back hard enough I can hear that english voice doing the narrating so maybe it is in that voicing. I'm pretty much a chameleon when I write since I have so little practice with fiction and one of the reasons that I don't want to even try publishing yet is because I think a lot of times I'm outright plagiarizing.
Also yurie sorry about those middle paragaphs, I do get caught up with inner dialogue and that passage in particular I might have intentionally made difficult because I wanted it to be difficult and breathless, so I understand your hesitation. The next story I revise I'll try to make sure is a more conventional one that's not as stupid/pretentious/masturbatory.
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On July 27 2011 08:23 AiurZ wrote:
I'm not 100% sure but if I remember right the voice that I was channeling/had been reading/had heard read was john barth.
I usually disregard these blogs, but that's peculiar enough to warrant comment, assuming you vie for "literary" writing. Whatever follows, remember your story was better than a lot of the creative writing in these blogs.
Items of advice:
1. Read more. Default, universal advice. Percy Bysshe Shelley read for ten hours a day (reportedly). William Faulkner commanded students read everything, from high to low, from the classics to cereal boxes. Roberto Bolaño's essay on writing short stories quickly becomes an exercise in name-dropping. Read, read, read. Read more. And then read more.
1a. Some will tell you hone your voice by not reading. Creative writing programs are full of this, and most creative writing majors don't read enough, and it shows. Honing your voice by not reading is bullshit advice and you shouldn't follow it. The more you read, the more you see the variegated spectrum of options available to you in narrative, sentence, structure, etc. If you're a writer, you'll read like one. You'll dialogue with texts without intending to; you will respond to what you like and tease out what you don't. This is how you hone your voice: by discovering what you want to read, what you want to write, and what your reference points are in going about it. (e.g. your stream-of-consciousness prose mixes a staccato rhythm with rambling, so it's a poor man's Woolf or Dostoevsky. Read Gertrude Stein or Gary Lutz to see different takes.)
1b. Read poetry, especially modern poetry, which is largely honing language, making it efficient and/or difficult, and finding its sonorousness. If you don't like poetry, develop a taste for it. If you do, read more.
1bi. Write poetry. Further concentrating your verbal expressions will tighten up your sentences. (Faulkner says young writers should write poetry, which is emotional rather than clinical, and older writers should write fiction, which benefits from age and wisdom. I'm paraphrasing, and no, I don't agree with that, but it's worth thinking about.)
1bii. Write formal poetry. The above but doubly so, plus getting into iambs, dactylls, etc. will further acclimate you to how a sentence can or should sound. Note that although sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, etc. will improve your skill in employing language, they will be a hard sell to prospective periodicals who actually publish poetry. Consider it practice.
2. Work on your pacing, especially if you're trying to experiment with structure. The shift from the librarian to the conclusion is abrupt because neither section is properly developed.
2a. Re development, at no point in your story do I feel I am not dealing with cardboard cutouts. Introducing your librarian as "average... average... average" hampers this. I realize you're constructing these narratives around communication and loneliness; if that motif, theme, whatever is your anchor, construct more brief narratives to explicate it.
3. Read nonfiction - philosophy, theory, history, etc. Read philosophers and theorists whose ideas are by all means absurd. Read Spinoza. Read about semiotics. Read science fiction. Read fantasy. It seems like you haven't, because if you had, the "Language is a grotesque animal..." passage, where I imagine you feel your story crests, or your foray into stream-of-consciousness suicide contemplation wouldn't come across so naive. Hume, Wittgenstein, et al went there before. Read them and go further.
4. Re "The next story I revise I'll try to make sure is a more conventional one that's not as stupid/pretentious/masturbatory." No. Of course you are writing for your audience - everybody has an audience whether or not they desire one or are aware of one - but starting with your audience and writing towards that audience, trying to write one the audience will like, is a bad move all over. You will force yourself to sand down your edges into something bland, pedestrian, and unnecessary. You might get published, but you won't be happy with yourself. (Personally, I think an author earns their indulgences, like in obfuscating Pynchon or Gaddis or Wallace novels where the reader is buffeted with dense thickets of prose, slapped around more or less, before being tossed something incredibly tender, touching, and lucid. For short stories this is a moot point.)
5. Be pretentious. Be stupid. You're young. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace (among others) disparage their younger selves' writings as stupid and forced experimental or avant-garde posturing from young, cynical, pessimistic, nihilistic, bad writers. David Foster Wallace basically disowned his first novel and his first collection of short stories. I'm not saying you should be like them, worship Barth and Barthelme and Robbe-Grillet until you're 30 and turn into Tolstoy; I'm saying write, write, write, and work with it, and evolve as a writer and a person. If at 30 you want to rip it up and start again, then you just learned something. You might write something fascinating.
6. If you're considering submitting, read this. HTMLGIANT kind of sucks, but this is a good piece.
(edit) 7. There are no rules, but you probably already knew that. There's just advice that it helps to consider. Flannery O'Connor reportedly read very little before spontaneously deciding she wished to write, but she's a happy accident in the history of literature.
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I don't wish to be mean, but I want to offer some criticism just because you asked for comments on your writing and made the effort to put it up. Hopefully it doesn't affect your future postings and perhaps you can pick up some constructive criticism.
I did not enjoy this story. There were many sentences that were too long. There didn't seem to be any progression or plot linking the different elements together. Likewise there was no ending or real story to follow.
As for improvement I take the position that writing is not something so easily taught but rather comes from your personal style. The technical weaknesses were quite distracting though. I may not be qualified to offer this feedback, lacking formal study in the subject, so take my comments as a casual reader/writer however you like.
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jon: thanks for the comments. Most of my study is related to poetics and prosody, and I'm a pretty active reader so I feel like I'm pretty well equipped to take your advice.
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On July 27 2011 06:28 Binky1842 wrote:
^because reading is hard, right? wordz n shit
Y, for reference I can show my official training on ladder.
Then I of course do custom games (amateur literature).
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EPT
