Running away with the plot

Yesterday I called up my sister to chat. She had left a message a while back that I just get around to hearing about wanting to talk about writing, so I decided to follow it up. We had a nice conversation about writing and the creative process and how characters develop in your mind.

Afterwards, deciding to run with this state of mind, I sat down and started working on a story I had been working at. Four characters were sitting down at a table and talking. I worked through the section, writing what the characters said.

Something weird happened. Eventually, one of the characters verbally confronted another, and the second got angry. In fact, the first actually accused the second of being very risible. I had not really been expecting the conversation to go in this direction. I stopped writing, not knowing if I should go on or not, or start over. The first character was calm and impassive, usually. This seemed to kind of come out of the blue. Yet it also felt rooted in his character. And I had wanted to these characters to share a close bond, or so I thought. But now it looked like I was setting them up to be kind of antagonistic. This completely messed up where I thought this story was going. What to do?

Yet later that night, I was sitting around, and thinking about these characters, and it occurred to me what was going on.

Now, this story, or at least this scene, is supposed to be slightly allegorical. The characters sitting at the table represent life, death, nature, and human will. The character representing life is the main character, and is almost a blank slate. Death sits passively, has almost no discernible personality, but has a power of presence that allows him to dominate, with hardly speaking, the entire atmosphere of a scene. Nature is the calm, passive one, and the one who rebukes the other the Life. Human will is large, good-humored, but with a bit a bit of a sadistic streak.

And it made sense to me that Nature would Rebuke life in such a way. It is nature with makes life brutal, that forces living things to engage in the world, reminding them of their isolation and violence, a fact of existence that cannot be escaped. The point of most world religions is dealing with how life, or existence, in the world invariably leads to suffering. Why wouldn't Nature remind Life of how brutal he can be?

And what happened next worked to. Will laughs. The human response to the suffering of existence to make light of it, to revel in it. Or perhaps just deal with it with a common nervous response.

Death chastises Nature, by only saying his name, leading Nature to apologize. Death referees the battle between living things and their surroundings. The continued death of species allows creatures to continue existing in nature, and puts limits upon what nature can accomplish. It is the moderator between us and our surroundings, and it does this with barely a word.

Also, I thought about where I know the story is going. Two books later in the story. The characters that I am imbuing as Nature and life will meet for the last time that the Nature character with be alive. At this point I will probably have abandoned these particular allegories for the characters, allowing them to shift into something new. But Nature character will be about to die, due to speaking his mind to the wrong people. The Life character will be in a kind of exile, in part for an part of violence he committed in the grip of an almost divine fury. This first confrontation will echo the place these characters find themselves in when they last speak. And I hadn't known that when I wrote the rebuke.

Now, keep in mind, I didn't plan any of that, or write it with allegory in mind. I had just come up with characters whose personalities, I thought, reflected certain vague concepts, then let them sit and talk. And they ended up doing something I hadn't expected, and being more interesting than what I had planned.

So I have decided to keep it. Hell, I think I will lengthen it, add in some commentary that underlies the metaphor a bit more (as well as some other issues).

I love when characters run away with the plot.

Politics, part 2: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obama

(Hey, I got an audience last time! Neat!)

When I left off, I was talking about how I had developed an emotional connection to Barack Obama.

Well, this was not good. One of the fundamental points of being a cynical, wounded-idealist leftist is that you are convinced that all politicians are corrupt, are "scum until proven human" (as I saw it put in a blog comment somewhere). How can a person be a good person, a person deserving of your trust and support, if they pursue a career in politics?

So for me, liking Barack—and I have always liked Barack: as I write this, there is a Obama-Democrat-U.S. Senate sticker within viewing distance, plastered on my printer—was always kind of a guilty experience. “Sure,” I told myself, “you may think you like him, but he's still, at the end of the day, a politician, like all the rest, and not worthy of respect.”

"You need to stay critical, Matt," I would tell myself. "Watch out. Don't let him pull the wool over your eyes."

So I tried not to get involved. Though I felt so proud to have voted for him—my first senator!—I tried not to follow him too closely. I didn't want to get my hopes up. And it hurt, too. Whenever I heard things about him in the Senate, it was almost invariably things pointing about how he wasn't the Great Liberal Hope that we had thought he would be. He was just too damn conciliatory! Sure, I told myself that he had to strike a low-key tone in the Senate, because no one can show up in the Hall of One Hundred Kings with buzz of being the Future High King and have that go over well. So you better be quiet and be modest and work at not rocking the boat. Because the Kings would love to just freeze you out and skirt those vaunted prospects. At that point, you can get more done by working within the system, than by getting up and taking a stand. The political realm is a realm of pragmatism and strategy, not of ideals. I understood that.

Unfortunately, not everyone seemed to understand that. In fact, a lot of people with a lot more info on politics seemed to conclude the exact opposite thing (these people being bloggers). They concluded that Obama had amounted to nothing, let the side down. He had taken no heroic stands. Never mind that there taking heroic stands never accomplished anything in electoral politics; it just would have meant something to them if he had put his head on the chopping block for a lost cause at some point. But he didn't so he was same old, same old. Which really, it was hard to argue with. What had he done for me lately?

Then the motherfucker announced he was running for president. For 2008.

"Too soon!" I thought. "He needs more experience! He's just going to make an ass of himself now, and ruin his chances for later. Besides, Hillary has this thing in the bag. He should just wait it out, and run in 2016."

Even thought I thought this, I had a pretty good idea why he was running. And it was all our fault. By "we," I mean "people from Illinois." For all those people who live outside Illinois, or supported Hillary, sorry. We fucked it up for you.

There's an anecdote that I feel conveys this phenomenon pretty well. It was Thanksgiving 2004, at my aunt's house. Obama had just been elected to the Senate. Kerry had lost the election. We were talking about politics. Now, Mom's side of the family is very Democratic, as far as I know. In fact, the only person there who I knew to have ever bothered to identify was Republican was my Uncle Rick. Rick had been a pretty proud Republican, and still, I think, carries some of the knee-jerk assumptions of a standard Republican. But then Enron happened, and Uncle Rick followed that thing after it fell off the front page, and it made him livid. It was obvious to him that those guys were all crooks, and the Republican Party was complicit in their crimes. And after that, Uncle Rick stopped identifying as a Republican. (I believe my dad's line had always been, "He doesn't earn enough to be a Republican.")

Anyways, it was Thanksgiving, and the conversation turned to politics, and the lost election, and what to do next, and without prompting or mention from anyone, my Uncle Rick said "You know who could be president, is Obama."

And that was when I felt, for sure, that it wasn't all in my head. It wasn't just me. There really was a desire, writ large, for this man to be president. I imagined people all over Illinois having similar experiences, talking to each other, telling each other they wanted this man to be president. Then I imagined Barack, the elected official, talking to groups of people, all of them spontaneously telling him, "We want you to run for president!" That kind of thing can go to your head.

Now, I am not sure exactly when I wanted Barack to run for president. I didn't have it fit into any kind of schedule. I just knew I wanted it to happen at some point, and I knew I couldn't wait.

And then he went and declared himself for the next bloody election.

I thought this was a huge misstep. "No!" I thought. "Barack, what are you doing? Don't you know you have to build up a head of experience first, get some legislative successes under your belt? Otherwise they will treat as some punk kid who doesn't know what he is doing. And you might even damage your chances for later!"

So I was not optimistic. In fact, I kind of didn't even want him to run. I wanted to save him for later, like some sweet from Easter that I was hoarding.

Plus there was that whole Hillary Clinton thing going on. But I'm not ready to speak of Hillary Clinton.

And there was another thing. I had been, have been, am, a pretty heavy reader of political blogs. I don't think it's so much that I care about the world of politics. I don't really have a stomach for organizing and activism and stuff like that, to my detriment. I think I am just too hermetic in character to go for that whole "engaged in the world" thing. But I respect the people who are, lord knows the rest of us need them.

Anyways, the bloggers seemed to be downright skeptical of Barack Obama. "Where is this coming from?" I thought. "Why are you getting down on Barack? Can't you see how he is awesome? Ok, he hasn't done much in the senate, and he's not really taking any out-there stances but, but ... Damn it, why can't you just get behind him like I want you to?!" (There are some pretty good reasons why I don't try to be more politically engaged.)

So eventually I relented. Maybe he just wasn't the Great Liberal Hope. I let it go.

This all happened before he actually entered the race, incidentally. Another reason I didn't really care when he jumped in. And so, I didn't really pay attention to the election coverage for a while. But I was still kind of rooting for Obama, for old time’s sake, even though the bloggers I was reading were going for Edwards en masse. The only refuge I really had was talking to my sister, Anne, every so often, about Obama, and how he would be awesome, and we really preferred him to anyone else. (Unless Gore decided to enter, in which case, history just had to be corrected, ya know?)

Then Anne and Mary just had to watch those fucking debates and switch to Hillary. Hillary! (I and not ready to speak of Hillary.) I was alone again. And Obama seemed like a lost cause. And well, I noticed that, you know, he really wasn't as far to the left as I was, so really I should support someone like Dennis Kucinich, right? Someone closer to my end of the spectrum? So I said I was for Kucinich. But really, that was just despair talking. I didn't really know Kucinich from Adam. I never looked up his specific positions. I never watched him speak. (I saw Obama speak the night before the 2004 election in a Unitarian Church in Champaign. Dick Durbin was there too. Only elected officials I have ever seen in person.) I didn't find him inspiring at all, and didn't really think he had the political skills to pull off anything I wanted done. I was just grumbling. I might as well have just supported Ron Paul or said I would write in Eugene V. Debs.

And that's were I was, disaffected, angry, and just wanting it to be January 2009 already so that that cocksucking motherfucker would not be in office.

Then Iowa happened.

The day of the Iowa caucuses, I spent the entire day sitting in my apartment. I had only recently gotten back home from my Christmas visit. I was on anti-depressants, waiting to feel somewhat different, unemployed, and basically working at actually getting out of bed in the morning. I can't really remember what I did that day, but I do remember occasionally thinking about how somewhere, nearby, there were people caucusing, including my sister and her boyfriend, and feeling a little bad about not being out there too. I also remember that the polls showed a nearly three-way tie between Edwards, Clinton, and Obama. Iowa was likely to not actually even matter, despite the hype.

Late in the day, I checked some blogs to see what the outcome was. Obama had won with an 8 point margin of victory.

Where the fuck did that come from?

And then it all came back. I was happy. My guy had won! Wait, my guy? Yes, yes, I suppose he was my guy! I mean, here I was, telling myself he had been my second choice, but, realistically, I had been rooting for him all along.

Now, the thing about the result in Iowa was, the victory in and of itself was not important. It was the margin. All the polls showed a dead heat, and here he was with an 8-point margin? In Iowa? The black guy?

That changed the narrative of the race. Suddenly, he had a chance. Suddenly, it was a competition between Hillary and Barack.

I don't have any interest in rehashing the ups and downs of the next couple of months, with New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and beyond. That way madness lies. So let me just say that after Iowa I started really following the campaigns, and as time went on, I found myself getting farther and farther into the tank for Barack Obama.

See, what the Iowa caucus did, what it did for me, and what I think it did for other people, was prove as a kind of validation. Whatever it was Obama was trying to do—and I will talk about that later—he had shown that he could pull it off. He wasn’t just some empty suit with a lot of charisma, because charisma is not something that wins you a dead heat caucus state. Obama actually had serious political skills, skills that no one was paying attention to, skills that, for me, encapsulate why it is that he is the best candidate for the presidency, not just for someone like me, for anyone who is restless about the state of America.

I’ll get to that next time.

Deep Thought of the Day

Universal individualism is Anarchy.
Universal democracy is Anarchy.
Pure Christianity is Anarchy.

Corrupt individualism is Libertarianism.
Corrupt democracy is oligarchy.
Corrupt Christianity is slave morality.

inspired by.

"The Gloaming"

A poem by noted poet W.B. Yeast*:

Staring at the candle I fritter away
The last few hours of a winter's day.
Thinking deeply, on all that has past
On fractured remembrances of friend's days last.

Lost in the gloaming, the darkness creeps in
On the flickering light that is all that was been.
The candle goes out! Now what shall I find
In the deep, dark recesses that I call my mind?

The mind, the mind! Tis all we have left!
When the world turns funny and all reason has left.
Tis there we feel peace, tis there we feel calm.
Its meditative space is the Gilead balm!

Yet tis there I feel sad, tis there that I hurt!
There festers Paranoia, who keeps me alert!
Is nowhere safe? Is my temple profaned?
Maybe demons live in it to keep me insane...

Is that what tempts me? Some phantom, some ghost?
Is the world at large not what devil's me most?
Perhaps it is something beyond understanding...
Or maybe tis someone on some distant landing...

High up the gods, those distant great figures
Look down on us like we are low crawling creatures.
They break us and burn us and blow us to pieces.
Might also they stride in our most sacred places?

My thoughts aren't my own! My temple is theirs!
From them comes all that I think unawares
My love, my hate, my passions and fears,
All whispered by voices that I never hear.

Do I still sit darkness? No, only a wind
Had flickered the candle; the light it had hid.
But now I see more, the wax that is burned
It is not alone, to be by the gods turned.

*White Bread Yeast, that is. Who is actually a character in a story I am working on. The real person who wrote it is me. While subbing in health class. The kids were watching a video.

Voice

Recently, I have been working on a scene that would take place in one of the much later parts of SK, in, oh, Book III or so. It's a short scene, and I am stalled on it by having to write a passage of dialog from. It's fun to just jump around like this, write a scene that comes to me, even if it is not related to the place I am actually on in the story. I feel that actually writing these scene that pop into my head fullformed is an essential part of getting over my Fear of Writing.

An interesting part of working on this piece is that I think I have begun to develop a voice for the SK material. I think part of why I have been hesitant in writing this one (I have been stalling on it since last week) is that I am not sure if it's the right voice, partially because its very similar to the very first attempts I have had at writing this story.

It's very sparse. It relies heavily on simple descriptions of setting, sometimes, when I'm on, embracing imagist language. I tend to excise prepositions and linking words, resulting in long sentences that functions as lists of actions committed by the characters. I avoid narration of internal thoughts and emotions, relying more on a careful description of mannerisms, facial expressions, movements within a space, and vocal tone to convey what characters are thinking. In a sense, this shows almost a cinematic influence, as if I am describing the choices that actors would take to express their characters inner worlds. It is also very heavy on dialogue and portraying specific scenes.

There are a variety of reasons why I think I keep settling into this voice, but it keeps giving me pause. I guess I wish it was more flourid, more artful, more lyrical, with words that sang and danced off the page. Instead it feels more workmanlike, and boring to read. Which is discouraging.

Anyways, here's a taste of it. Tell me what you think.

Torquesville found Ahasaurus among a glade of trees along the river. They were sparsely popular, but once you walked a few dozen yards in, the outside was hidden. Ahasaurus was standing at the far edge, where the trees began to part, revealing a cliff overhanging the Rhine; he was staring at a pile of stones about as high as a man’s knees. There were many of these piles of stones scattered throughout the wood, all roughly the same size, made up of stones that went from being as small as a fingernail to as large as a head.

Ahasaurus turned, startled, then breathed out uneasily. Torquesville smiled kindly in return. “Oh, it’s you,” said Ahasaurus. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stalk off like that, like a small child.”

Torquesville raised an eyebrow, smirking, looked down intently at one of the piles of stone. He nudged one stone about with the tip of his foot. “Oh, that’s quite all right,” he said, looking up. “I know how it can be. He can be quite insensitive, can’t he?”

Ahasaurus let out a little laugh, more of a breath than anything. “Yes, well, thank you. But really, I shouldn’t be so, so…”

“Touchy?” asked Torquesville. He was rolling the stone about on the ground like a ball.

“Yes,” said Ahasaurus. “Like a woman.”

Torquesville laughed.

“It’s just that I should be more…thick-skinned about it now. Not getting all hysterical and rushing off in a huff all the time.” His voice quieted almost to a whisper. “It’s been four centuries, after all.”

“Hmm,” said Torquesville, frowning slightly. He stared intently at the stone he was rolling with his foot.

They were quiet for a moment. Birds were chirping in the distance, and the Rhine hummed quietly along beyond the cliff.

It was Ahasaurus who broke the silence. “What are these stones doing here?” he said.

Torquesville kicked the stone he was playing with back into place. “You mean you don’t know?”

Ahasaurus turned and looked squarely at him. “Am I supposed to?”

Torquesville shrugged. “Not necessarily. It’s just, I thought it was obvious. They’re graves.”

Ahasaurus stepped back quickly from his pile, looking frightened.

Torquesville laughed.

Update: The scene is now finished.