I Regret to Inform You That I've Finished a Novel

I figured I've done enough posts accompanied by pictures of stacks of notebooks or me writing, so enjoy this juvenile drawing of marine life.

There’s really not a right thing to do when you finish the rough draft of a novel. The thrill of writing the final words on a story you’ve toiled over for at least a month (NaNoWriMo’s ultra-compressed time frame seems to be about the record) feels like it deserves some kind of celebration, so it’s only natural to tell your friends or post about it on Facebook. And while you’ll probably get a ton of likes and praise, inevitably someone will want to know what it’s about. Maybe some writers are better at this than me, but every time I try to describe my writing, I start in the wrong place and pile on twenty different genre labels and always end with “I promise it makes a lot more sense written out.” Even if you can clear that hurdle, though, you’ll still feel like a hack years later when you dig up the post celebrating the completion of a novel that you now know is unsalvageable. The other option is not talking about it, at least not until you’re ready for beta-readers. But you only need to let it slip once (and it’s hard not to, given how much it dominates your life) and suddenly you’re faced with that “What’s it about?” question again, and you feel like a self-important moron for staying silent. 

All things considered, it seems like the only right way to do it is to make your novel an international bestseller before it’s even finished, and that hasn’t worked for me yet.

I’ve finished first drafts of seven novels so far. I’ve announced four of them online (two on this blog) and stayed silent on two. Actually, I guess by writing this post, I’m choosing to announce the seventh one as well, which I finished this past Sunday.

To be clear, I’m not bragging. I’m admitting that I’ve written drafts of seven novels, only one of which I’ve ever seriously edited*. A writer saying that is like a mother saying, “I’ve given birth to seven children! One made it to kindergarten, I think. The rest I haven’t heard from in a while.” 

The problem, as I’ve written about often before, is that I always get distracted by the next story to wander through my mind. Things were especially bad back when I had a policy of letting each story sit for a year before revisiting it, by which time I’d be knee-deep in a new story, and the awful first page, if I even took the time to look at it, would convince me to drop this story before I could waste any more time on it. For me, writing new stuff is like discovering an uninhabited island, brimming with bright and endlessly diverse life. Editing, on the other hand, is like  finding an island that’s been overpopulated to extinction and sterilized by pollution and trying to find some use for the land. As much as I want to see something of mine published, the short-term thrill is addictive enough that I find a way to rationalize my behavior. I say that the next story will be perfect and published the first time around. No matter how many essays and interviews with successful writers tell me that’s worthless, I can’t help believing it. Even now, less than a week after finishing my last novel, I’ve got ten pages of notes on a new novel and I’m half convinced that I should just go ahead and start it, instead of polishing one of the seven novels, seven novellas, or countless short stories and other projects I already have.

But maybe I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself. Back in early high school, I remember thinking that I’d be content forever if I could just finish anything I started writing. No need for publication, or any reader but me: if I could only give my story an ending, it’d be enough. And at an author-talk last year I heard the novelist Lan Samantha Chang** explain that publication, or even recognition, isn’t the eternal happiness most young writers expect it to be. The story doesn’t become any better once it’s printed and bound and shipped to bookstores. Aside from the odd one-novel-wonder like Harper Lee, most writers are probably never satisfied, and if we were, we’d never be productive again. This isn’t to say that I’m proud to finish seven novels and abandon most of them. But maybe I’m not quite as stuck as I thought I was.

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* And the one I did do some work on, by the way, has a sexist subplot that I don’t know how to remove and a protagonist who makes it through a good seventy five percent of the story just standing around and blinking. If it has a chance of publication, that’s a long way away.

** Who wrote All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, which I highly recommend.

Chivalry and Tragedy

Note on the photo above: I went to the ruins of a French castle with my Dad as a kid, and I wanted to find a picture of that, but there weren't any, so here's one of us just hanging out.

Arthurian legend is one of those weird things in our culture where only the parodies really have relevance anymore. People mostly know king Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the vast majority of times I hear “Lancelot,” it’s a sarcastic way of calling someone annoyingly moral*. Most animated movies based on these stories have a moment where they try to prove that “this isn’t your classic story” by showing a self-reliant damsel or bumbling knight, but what kid in the audience knows about the classic stories anymore? What adult, even?

It’s not all that complicated why things got to be this way: the stories and tropes stuck with Western culture even as the poems that inspired them became too archaic for most people to take the time to read**. We still have a vague sense of the chivalrous battles and heartfelt romances of the Knight of the Round Table, a sense of a purer time when our culture was young and our world was simpler. Maybe it’s just me, but I could get nostalgic for the stories of the Round Table even before I knew anything about it. 

I don’t think it’s just me though. And the way that T. H. White plays with that nostalgia is what makes The Once and Future King so effective.

It’s a difficult book to get through, funny and charming much of the time, but filled with digressions made for a readership with better attention spans than most of us have anymore. And, though it’s populated with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenever, and all the other old names, it almost never deliver what we expect from an Arthurian story: romance and combat. Swordfights and jousts are often the most boring parts of the book, and usually the shortest, with White often dismissing an entire battle with a sentence like “They fought on foot for two hours.” We get a lot of dialogue around the morality of battle and the effect it has on the knights and the world around them, but the actions itself is rarely a draw. Meanwhile, the relationship between Lancelot and Guenever, the only real instance of romantic love in the book, is almost entirely out offscreen or told in summary. I don’t just mean sex; we hardly ever see real affection between Guenever and Lancelot. As with fighting, we know an awful lot about the romance’s results: Lancelot’s conflict between his religion and his love, Guenever’s growing envy as Lancelot spends more time with his actual wife, and we know both characters well enough to care about each of them. But as for proof of real love between the two of them, it’s almost completely absent.

This absence of the core appeals of Arthurian legend doesn’t make The Once and Future King a bad book by any stretch. In fact, it’s what makes it so great. Because it’s important to remember that, as old as the book may seem at times, chivalry was as foreign and fantastical to the world it was written into as it is to ours. Those readers had come looking for the same Arthurian tropes, and so they, like the modern reader, were a little confused that all the good stuff was kept hidden and undramatized, and a little anxious to see when it would be out in the open.

And White puts it out in the open at the most tragic time: when we already know it’s over. By this point the reader knows that a faction of rebellious knights are planning to catch Lancelot and Guenever in their affair. Even Lancelot knows on some level, he’s been warned, but he goes to Guenever’s chambers anyway, and dotes on her and brushes her hair. They’re already old by this time: her hair is white, the excitement of their love is past. But there’s a gentle affection between the two of them. And when we see it, it feels so much more powerful than if the love had been introduced outright, because it isn’t a simple love, it isn’t a love without stakes. It’s a love with a cost, the cost of Camelot itself, and so it means something.

The same pattern recurs a few pages later with the other element of chivalric tales: fighting. A knight arrives to catch Lancelot in the act. Lancelot goes up against this armed and armored challenger almost naked and wins. It’s the only fight scene in the novel that feels truly tense, mostly because it’s the only fight scene White chose to dramatize. And, like the scene with Guenever, the fight has the same melancholy aura to it. Even if you didn’t know that this was where the Arthurian legends turned sour, you could guess that, when Lancelot kills the knight sent to arrest him, things can never be the same again. The one fight we got to see was our last.

If White had written the story the way it’s expected to be written, with steamy romance and epic battles from the start to the end, it would’ve been awfully boring. That’s because the same quality that makes these things easy to romanticize and dream about also makes them dull to focus on for very long: they’re weightless. A knight and lady falling in love with only trivial obstacles, who never sacrifice anything to be together, doesn’t really matter much. Neither does a battle against a knight too evil or a monster too dumb for their death to matter. But we still love these things, in a sidelong and absent-minded way, because they’re uncomplicated enough to be loved easily. White takes that love and makes it tragic, because whatever is easy can’t last. Even though I’d never want to take the time to read the battles and romances that White skims over, I still miss them once I know that they’re over. I miss them in the same way I miss childhood; not any particular time or experience in it, but just the general emotions I might not have ever really felt as a kid, and that I don’t have a prayer of articulating now anyway**.

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* Which is kind of ironic, since Lancelot is mostly characterized as a guy cheating on his best friend’s wife, who knows it’s wrong but can’t help himself.

** Having read one genuine Medieval poem (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is widely regarded as one of the most accessible), I can say that yes, they really are a struggle, even if, in this case, it was worth it.

** Sorry for not doing something more timely in such a crazy and depressing week. Honestly, I felt I needed to write this as a sort of distraction from all the craziness and depression. Then the post turned out pretty depressing in its own right. Sorry.

The Protests and Christian Wrath

There’s really only one thing to talk about right now*.

The other day I ran to Linden Hills, one of the further removed and wealthier parts of Minneapolis, and only found one direct artifact of the rioting: a smashed window in a small jewelry store. In nearly every other store, though, there were some signs that were a little less directly about the protests, some painted on the plywood used to protect the storefronts: #BlackLivesMatter repeated a hundred times, Martin Luther King quotes, lists of other black men murdered. One local children’s bookstore had tiny red handprints under the message “Justice for George,” while the bakery next door marked itself a minority-owned business. I don’t doubt that many of these were put up by people who legitimately believe in the cause, especially because many of them put up similar signs after the police murdered other black men. But I also can’t help but remember the Bible story of passover, when every Israelite family put a mark of lamb’s blood on their door so that the angel of death, out to kill each firstborn Egyptian, would pass them by. The business owners are sending the same message in their store window printouts as the Israelites did in the blood mark: “We’re on your side. Spare us from your wrath.”

It probably seems a little harsh to compare the protesters to a vengeful God, and maybe it is a little misleading when the vast, vast majority of them are peaceful. But keep in mind, God is good in this story. In what seems almost too on-the-nose, the angel of death came to punish Egyptians for keeping the Israelites as slaves. It can be hard to relate this wrathful God to the common Christian understanding of a gentle, forgiving Jesus. In fact, I often explain away troubling Old Testament stories as misinterpretations of the divine truth. But the fact remains: punishment, wrath, and righteous fury have a place in Christian morality. And if there were ever a time for these, it is after an unjust murder, supported by a rotten system.

All of this is a very simple idea applied to a very complex situation, though. For one, we don’t know who exactly is doing what in the rioting. A family friend in the Twin Cities had to leave her home Saturday night because the entire street was lined with cars with out-of-state license plates, every passenger white and male and visibly angry. Also, I feel the need to say again (because it isn’t said often enough) most protesters are nonviolent, so we shouldn’t attribute the destruction in the Twin Cities to the entire group. Maybe the most important complication, though, is that the people whose places of life and work have been destroyed by the riots have legitimate suffering and pain.

Still, something to remember is that property matters, but life is always infinitely more important. That’s something I think we as a country have been bad about lately: we mourn the 100,000 dead alongside the growing unemployment and failing economy as though they all deserve the same level of grief. In the same way, I’ve often heard people say, “What happened to George Floyd is terrible, but-” and then go on to say something about looting or rioting. But none of the burning buildings or shattered windows can ever match the tragedy of a human life lost. And that human life didn’t disappear on accident or out of inevitability. George Floyd’s life was taken a racist system that has killed countless other black men like him. I believe that these protests can lead to change, which will save lives of black men who shouldn’t be at risk anyway. And, in that way, these protests are truly Christian.

What isn’t Christian, though, is the police and Trump administration’s response. There is nothing Christian, nothing good under any moral code, in firing tear gas and rubber bullets at nonviolent protesters and reporters. Worst of all is Trump himself, who had police fire tear gas at priests who were handing out medical supplies to protests in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, all to take a photo of himself holding a Bible, to try an convince the nation that his racist opposition to reform is somehow Christian.

It’s hard for me to read a sentence like that last one and not despair. And I know that my despair is nothing compared to what people of color experience routinely.

Acknowledging the tragedy of what has happened and hoping for what change might come from it is a tight balance to keep. But at least, when this tragedy is impossible to hide from, we might finally motivate real change.

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* For those of you reading this blog long after the fact, a little more than a week ago a black man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer for using a fake $20 bill. It has sparked a lot of peaceful protest, some arson, vandalism, and looting, and a lot more police violence.

Temple of the Captive God

With quarantine and all, I've been spending a lot of my time messing around with all my old Legos. Here's what I came up with so far.

I've got a little mythology built around it. It's from some kind of science-fantasy world where there were once immortal beings who have long since fled the mortal world. But one of them was left behind, trapped in rock (as a punishment? An accident? Not sure). Thousands of years later, some high-tech empire found him and built this structure to contain and study him.

They've mostly given up on studying him scientifically (he tends to eat anyone who gets close), but they can still ask him questions, and sometimes he responds. Mostly because he's bored by thousands of years alone and likes using humans as his personal entertainment. To that end, he tends to give the answer that will lead to respond to the most entertaining outcome (for him) rather than anything truthful.

I've been doing system and Bionicle build separately for a long time now, but this is my first time ever really trying to combine them. I think it turned out alright.

The staircase is the first part of it I built. That thing is just full of illegal building techniques).

Ever since I started with Bionicles (i.e. when I was three years old) I was fascinated with how they'd look interacting with minifigures, since even the tiniest ones are from minifig scale. Guess this is the answer.

Some Junk From the Basement

I’m running kind of low on ideas these days, so here’s some old junk I dug up from the basement.

For those of you who can’t read disgraphic, this says “Medieval Reality Game.” I think it was a mock-up for a knight-themed virtual-reality game I wanted to make. Note that the tag on the circle says “choking hazard.” 

Next we have a list of things I wanted to do over the summer. I think my mom encouraged me to make them academic goals, but that fell apart pretty quickly. I’m also pretty sure my mom wrote this too. 

And finally we have my petition to bring back Galidor, perhaps the worst Lego theme of all time. These things were hardly even Lego at all, made out of these enormous pieces that were so specialized you couldn’t dream of making anything decent of your own out of them. They also had a TV show, though I didn’t watch that, I just got obsessed over the awful toys for some reason. I remember passing these forms around to random people leaving church one Sunday, which is where most of the signatures come from. Probably, most people were just being polite. 

Incoherent Stories

Since everyone is stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, it’s only natural that Facebook chain posts are spawning at an unprecedented rate. And, since I’m stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, I’ve seen a lot of them. One that caught my attention the other day was “10 Things Everyone Else Likes But I Don’t.” I don’t think I’ll do that one, it just seems too contrarian, but I can definitely relate to the sentiment it picks up on: the alienation of everyone else being in love with something, especially some piece of storytelling, that you just can’t relate to. The two times I’ve felt that most acutely have been with the sorts of smart, artsy media that English majors like me are supposed to adore: David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive and Don DeLilo’s White Noise. And, if you’ll excuse me for being a contrarian for a little bit, I’d like to rag on them a little.

The problem with each of them is that they’re not really stories. Sure, they’ve each got characters and something resembling a plot, but you get the sense that the creator isn’t so interested in telling a story as they are in expressing some kind of idea, layered so deeply in abstraction that it’s incomprehensible to anyone’s lived experience. Which is cool, if you’re into that kind of thing, but not really what people read or watch stories for.

My disappointment with Mulholland Drive is actually sort of context dependent, and sort of own damn my fault: I watched it over a series of three nights, in forty minute segments, which meant that I got all excited by the straightforward story of a lesbian couple in Hollywood chasing lost memories, then felt enormously disappointed when the whole thing fell apart into dream logic that broke characterization and came off as both heavy-handed and incomprehensible at once. I’ve talked to real fans of the movie about its meaning, and now I can kind of see the appeal of putting together what actually happened, and there are some scenes that are perfectly beautiful. But I can’t imagine ever walking away from that movie satisfied, much less happy.

While Mulholland Drive might have made me begrudgingly respect David Lynch, White Noise got me irate at Don DeLilo. It has more consistent characters than Mulholland Drive, and a narrative that doesn’t leave you quite as perplexed, but it’s pretty clear that the author doesn’t really care much about any of it, not even the most emotional parts. What he does care about is making some kind of point (probably something about capitalism) through loads and loads of random details that are a little bit interesting, and clearly meant to be funny, but really don’t make up for the lack of story. The prose was so elegant that I had to finish the book, but I wasn’t very happy about it.

For a time, I took these two examples (and a couple other plotless, characterless, seemingly meaningless bits of media I’d seen) and formed them into a general hypothesis for storytelling: in order for a story to be worth anything at all, it needs to be coherent, direct, and human-centric. But then I found Petscop, which breaks every rule I’d just set out for what makes good art. And I also loved it.

Petscop is a youtube series recording someone playing through an obscure, low-budget Playstation game, using cheat codes to reveal disturbing hidden content about childhood abuse. The game doesn’t actually exist, the recordings are actually just animations, but it feels so authentic to that late 90s-early 00s game style that it gives a nostalgia rush to anyone who grew up with those games, like me. And then it corrupts that nostalgia with reminders that the pain and trauma existed, even, or perhaps especially, in that idyllic time. That feeling is so complex and powerful that I don’t really care that the narrative is incoherent, nonexistent, or inconsequential. Maybe it doesn’t make any linear sort of sense, but I still appreciate it immensely as an experience. 

Searching for some answers for Mulholland Drive after I’d first watched it, I found Roger Ebert’s five star review, where he wrote “Think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development.” At the time, I thought it was a total abandonment of a critic’s duty to actually work out what’s going on, but now I can’t think of a better way to explain how I feel about Petscop.

What separates my take on Petscop from Mulholland Drive or White Noise? I think it all comes down to experience. Mulholland Drive drew on nostalgia for an idealized Hollywood much in the same way Petscop drew on nostalgia for an idealized childhood cyberworld*. The difference is that I had the nostalgia necessary to feel what Petscop wanted me to feel, but not so much for Mulholland Drive. Plotlines and characters are so powerful in part because they give the reader someone to empathize with, and in doing so understand the emotions of the story and its author. When an author forgoes that, it’s a risky move, because there’s no guarantee that readers will be able to decipher it on their own. That doesn’t make the story bad, it turns out, just risky. 

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* Still not sure what, if anything, White Noise was drawing on, but sure, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Reading

A couple weeks ago, back when I was still at college, my girlfriend asked what I was writing about in my notebook, and I said, “I’m writing about how I need to write more about the things I read to improve my writing.” I had no idea why she broke down laughing at first, but pretty soon I realized that the whole thing was pretty convoluted and had at least four levels of meta (writing about writing about other people’s writing for my own writing). Ridiculous as it sounds, though, it was important for me to make a written commitment to writing about writing, because reading has never come easily to me.

I always feel jealous when people talk about how much they read as kids. It’s the kind of boasting you see a lot, especially in literary circles, the kind you can get away with because there’s a certain self-deprecation attached (“You can bet I didn’t get out much!” or something like that). My older sister and younger brother were both that kind of voracious and natural readers, my sister read widely and early, and my brother jumped straight from near-illiteracy to the entire Little House on the Prairie series when he was bored one summer. For me, on the other hand, I had the idea that reading was hard, and anything hard must also be dangerous somehow, so I treated thick books like radioactive material and stuck to a narrow set of mid-length books from series that I knew were safe, mostly Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the secret series by Pseudonymous Bosch. I became a sort of junior scholar of these books, reading the same chapters over and over again, rarely stepping outside the texts where I felt comfortable. 

Aside from school assigned books and a couple young adult fantasy series, my reading went through a dormant period in middle and high school, which lasted until I went to the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and felt like such an imposter among all these accomplished, well read people that I knew that I needed to read as much as I could as fast as I could. That started an era, which lasted up until recently, when I spent every break from college reading quickly and poorly, trying my best to make up for lost time. I took the opposite approach as I had as a kid, choosing the longest, hardest, densest  books that I could reasonably finish. When the story lost my interest, the furious desire to be the kind of serious writer who reads serious books carried me through however many pages there were to the finish. I don’t want to undersell this time, I read a lot of books that I enjoyed and that inspire me to this day. But, looking back at the shelves of books I’ve finished since then, there are so many that I only recollect hazily. There were so many subtle turns of phrase and nuances of the plot that I missed in my rush to get on to the next book. 

An English teacher quoted Kurt Vonnegut at my class once, to reprimand us for complaining about some reader-response assignment: “Reading without writing is like eating without digesting.” At the time I thought that out teacher, and Vonnegut, were setting hopelessly high expectations. I’m not sure what’s changed in me since then, but now the expectation seems reasonable, and the alternative terribly wasteful. I’ll teach plenty of English classes after I graduate, but I’ll never be a student in one again, I’ll never have this designated time to unpack what I read. So my only option, really, is to set aside a notebook and a little bit of time after each book to think through what was going on, how the author said what they said and what it all meant.

During study breaks between my newly online classes these days, I’ve set up my own system of studying my favorite books from the past few years. This week I’m looking at descriptions of landscapes, reading them and writing little notes about how the authors do what they do and what it all means. Next week it’ll be character introductions, and after that dialogue. There’s so much that I missed in these books, so much power in the language that I skimmed, already looking forward to the next thing. It’s almost disgusting, how I wasted these books. But that’s okay. I’ve got plenty of time left in my life, and a lot of it’s free now since I’m stuck inside to dodge the coronavirus. I can catch up.