Saturday, August 29, 2009
Write about now
Gutentag!
What am I up to? This and that.
The short stories have been going well. I got a few of them done, though they need to be scoured. I have a few more publishers lined up for [The Obscure Opus], and I am staving off putting the scalpel to the last draft I did of it.
In any other circumstance, I would have in a heart beat. But I've decided to start something else. I said I was penning a short story at the beginning of this year. One about an old man who lived a horrible life. I had eventually scrapped it because it just did not feel natural to me. I was trying to strike a few chords of pathos but it turned out I was tone deaf. I can't intentionally write piteous material. I have been told that certain things that I had written which I had intended to be funny are in fact depressing, but otherwise, me trying to write to make people feel sorry for characters is like a newborn pretending to know the stock market. I'm not sure if it's because I'm a person who never goes about feeling sorry for himself about things. But if emotions conveyed in the author's work reflects the author's personality, then the treatment I'm getting at this asylum may be futile. I may suffer from irreconcilable lunacy.
And on the subject of feelings, I was reading Franz Kafka's The Castle recently, and started feeling really existential. My novel, [The Obscure Opus] is certainly filled with enough existentialism to make people not want to exist. Existentialist views are certainly espoused by two of the characters in it, and another one's life would give Franz Kafka nightmares. But that novel is pretty much done, and is shyly trying to emerge in the literary meat market. I have this vat of existentialist rage waiting to be released.
And this is why I decided that I might turn said short story into a novella. Something I can possibly bang out in a month. It will be referred to on here as [The Noxious Novella]. As with most of the work I've done, it will be surreal, blackly humourous, mordant, and have elements and events derived from my life, dreams, and personal views. But I guess I don't even have to say that, what else would I write, Clancy-esque political potboilers?
I will get a chance to be more experimental with this one. I want it to be small and effective. A drop of poison in a cup of espresso. I want it to ultimately have a starkly upsetting effect on the readers while making them laugh or at least sit with their mouths agape. In Ex-Drummer, protagonist/antagonist Dries says, "I can be totally happy yet quite ill at the same time." This summer, I've discovered that that is where I stand. I like being struck by misery and despair, nonexistent God help me, I think it actually makes me happy. This is how I want others to feel.
There is a danger to saying something like that, it makes me come across as some sort of provocateur. I will state that that is not what I intend to ever be. I plan on writing whatever flows through my mind naturally, and as I write it out, carefully choosing words which paint ugly pictures. I don't intend on just sitting back and delineating what would be the most disgusting and offensive thing to include in [The Noxious Novella]. I discovered that repulsiveness for the sake of repulsiveness is... well.. repulsive, not to mention disingenuous. I realized this a few summers ago when I read Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. Now, I like Chuck Palahniuk. I loved his earlier novels, and when I had started to take writing seriously, his work was inspirational to me, it gave me assurance that you can write bizarre stories which get celebrated as mainstream literature. I also think that if I get published, it will be thanks in part to him opening the doors. But with Haunted, I realized that I had outgrown his work. Haunted seemed to have the sole purpose of having each story out-gross the other. It was as if substance got lost, and the primary focus was seeing how far he could go with the revolting imagery. It didn't shock me or offend me, it just annoyed me. It was poor execution, and seemed too forced.
That is not what I intend. On the other hand, I do plan on being more deliberate with the structure of this novel. [The Obscure Opus] in its many iterations became more and more organic. The first draft of it had a rigid outline. I had characters, locations, events, time-lines, backstories all there, and next to each scene, I had little check boxes. As I laid out each scene, I would check the box off. There were no additive scenes, events weren't removed, events weren't changed. But with each draft, I started to just go with whatever came to mind. And if I was out, and had an idea, I would write it down on the first piece of paper I could find, or on my PDA, then try to incorporate it some how. The result is a novel which certainly has a progression from beginning to middle to end, but without a serious adherence to pacing and not creating a real sense of urgency until the final acts I would say.
This time, I want to make the story tight, as well as try to do as many literary backflips through flaming hula hoops as possible, although not getting inter-textual and postmodern with the formatting like David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski, or Steven Hall or anything. I do have an idea for a novel which I would employ similar techniques for, but that's far into the future.
I will see more about how this turns out soon enough. Luckily, I intend for it to be short so that by the time I get tired of it, I will be done with it, anyway.
See everyone in Hell!
