7 posts tagged “character”
Cross-posted from "So anyway..."
If you’re doing the book club and you don’t want any spoilers or if you don’t want your opinion tainted any further than the post title did, stop reading.
Okay I’m about halfway through this piece of shit and I’m torn between throwing it across the room in disgust or continuing to read just to see what inanity happens next. Let me summarize.
There are four parts, each w/ a different narrator. I’m partway through Pt 3. Pt 1 is narrated by a self-righteous dead 18 year old named Cheryl who made her boyfriend marry her their first month of senior year so they could fuck and not go to hell. It’s not a joke. She seems to have taken it very seriously. The action jumps all over the place. One page might be “this is the story of our wedding” and the one across from it might be “and then the blood dripped off the tables and onto my notebook.” Oh did I neglect to mention the manner of her death? A high school episode of violence, the description of which is so beyond belief that I can’t bring myself to say anything about it for fear of my eyes rolling irretrievably back into my skull.
BTW: Did you know that blood is maroon or purple? Apparently so. And in such mass quantities that you can be covered in it like glue, to the point where you stick to the hood of your wife’s car and make a ripping noise when you get up. I don’t think it was supposed to be funny. I hope not b/c it wasn’t. It was just unbelievable and gross. I mean, you can have violence well-described and meaningful to your story. This read like something written for a high school assignment.
And the dialogue? Ugh. Don’t get me started. I don’t know any human beings who talk like this (much less teenagers) and the dialogue is so alike that you can’t tell who’s speaking. Doesn’t matter much b/c all the characters are two-dimensional, unsympathetic and interchangeable.
So as I met Cheryl, the more she talked, the more glad I was that she was dead. I looked forward to finishing the section just to watch her die.
Then I went on to Jason. Jason was interesting. A drifter junkie haunted by his past. I mean, seriously. How could I not just love that? Well here’s how: nothing happens to him. First of all, he can’t just narrate his section. It has to be a series of letters to his “nephews” (wink, wink). Big chunks are missing b/c he’s blacking out but when he comes back, it’s so boring, I wish he’d black out again. Nothing of any consequence happens. He’s on a boat that sinks. Nothing comes of it. He ends up stranded on the Trans-Canada Highway w/ a guy out of the Russian mob… and nothing comes of it.
Then he actually gets interesting, right when I’m ready to give up.
He starts telling this story of the day his brother is killed in a car
wreck (nine years after this massacre thing; he writes the letters 10
years after, in 1998). He was on his way to his SIL’s house and when he
gets there, apparently his cell battery was dead and he couldn’t call
anyone (b/c who ever heard of a car hook-up charger?). BTW: This is a
running gag, I guess. His gf, who narrates pt 3, has the same excuse
thing happen to her. Anyway, the SIL, who just had the RCMP tell her
that her husband’s dead, says to Jason “I have to have a baby NOW. I’m
ovulating! It has to look like Kent b/c I will never, ever be able to
conceive ever in life again.” So what does he say? I’m hanging on
reading, hoping they’ll at least have angry, grief-striken sex. He
says, I shit you not, “We have to get married.”
W.T.F?
So she says yes.
Now I’m dying.
They pass the scene of the accident, which is still being cleaned up, and head to Vegas. This gets better. They get to Vegas, get married at the same chapel where he married sanctimonious Cheryl. They go into the same hotel and *flash* they see a guy from their little Canadian hometown. So she goes off to play blackjack while Jason goes to the room. Come 2:30 a.m. She shows up for the fuck she had to have so badly that she hopped a plane to Vegas and married this loser. He’s all “Where have you been?” And, I shit you not, she says, “I had to kill that guy. He would have told everyone he saw us here today and I can’t have that. Now let’s make that baby.”
At this point, I laughed. I laughed b/c either it was her joking or she actually killed this guy and it is now officially the most ludicrous book I’ve ever read.
Guess which it is.
AND she got pregnant. How miraculous. With twins no less. To whom he addresses his letters.
After that, I was ready to chuck it. Then I kept reading b/c I had to know what happens next. Skimming ahead, the gf telling part three is scammed by a pseudopsychic who may have Jason in on her scheme. Then pt 4 is told by his religious nut father. All of these people have the same narrative voice, speak in the same dialogue… it’s just maddening. B/c this could have been cool but it is, to quote Syndrome, “Lame lame lame lame LAME.”
ETA: I finished it this morning. Apparently the Russian mob guy did figure. I didn’t care enough about any character to care what might have happened to Jason or why (pretty contrived situation, kind of like the rest of the book). And then the fourth part, narrated by Reg, was probably the best-written but absolutely not in keeping the the character’s established voice. You meant to tell me that the guy who’s telling me this is the same guy I’ve been seeing throughout? Doesn’t sound like him, doesn’t act like him, blech. He was the closest thing to a three-dimensional character written and when we come to the end, he’s just as self-involved and unsympathetic as all the other characters.
Oh and Jason was in on the psychic thing. He’d given the psychic a list of his & Heather’s (the gf) inside jokes so that “if anything ever happens to me, you can bilk her for thousands of dollars and she’ll feel comforted by the fact that I’m communicating from beyond the dead.
There was one single cyclical and interesting plot point. If a friend of mine had said, “Read this for me for some feedback before I publish it,” I would have said, “this father/son issue is the key to your whole book. Lose Cheryl. Lose Heather. Reg loses his sons, same as Jason lost his child when Cheryl was killed. Only Reg doesn’t know about Jason’s impending fatherhood and has his self-righteous “you were never a father, you can never know my pain” when Kent dies. That’s delicious. That’s huge. There’s your story.”
Instead I have 160 pages of no one to care about or identify with and I’m rooting for Cheryl to die and Jason to have unmarried sex for once in his life (yeah that showed up AGAIN in section 4, how you can’t have sex outside marriage), for stupid Heather to lose all her money and for Reg to have any kind of conversation instead of sitting in a Kinko’s writing a letter to his presumed-dead son. Oh and Heather? Is a court stenographer turned children’s author. She can’t just tell a story either. We have to wait for her to get off the phone, go to lunch, whatever. Cheryl’s dead. Don’t know how she held a pen to tell hers.
So many scenes that went nowhere. So many opportunities to tie bits of the story back to itself. Such unbelievably pompous dialogue that sounds the same out of every character’s mouth. Maybe this was some kind of POD book and I expected too much from it. I do expect that if you’re going to sit down and write a book, you should have semblance of how to structure it so that it has some kind of meaning. I feel like I just watched this author’s written masturbation. Now I sit back, having finished this book in maybe a week, and say, “And?” He zips up and leaves. Whatever.
Hey, at least I had an opinion 
ETA years later: I am SO not interested in this jerk's minions trying to convince me this steaming pile of shit is not, in fact, a steaming pile of shit. It remains the worst book I have ever read and I stand 100% by everything here. Honest to Christ, if you want to be a cheerleader for this guy, go find people who actually think he can construct a sentence, make a little fan club for yourselves and feel free to rid the world of every copy of this book.
I started working around 1:30 and I was done at a little after three. I wrote 2600 in that time. H was napping, Z was playing and I did nothing but write and listen to music (Nirvana). The music helped.
I blogged that I wouldn’t break 100k (I didn’t want to). I just looked at my final word count and it’s 99,994. LOL. Well, I didn’t break it! On January 18, I had 64 pages and about 37k. It is unbelievable to me that I wrote 118 pages, 63,000 words in three weeks. That’s a NaNo in and of itself.
As to the ending, from the beginning, my idea was that the end would be Seth telling his poetry teacher (Jason Braddock) that he was going “home.” The question would remain “what did he mean?” That we would have some idea that he might have meant “where he came from” but that it might be “to Natalie.” Turns out that he didn’t do either. He connected with home (his mother) but he broke another connection (Natalie). I also realized that I was trying to fix all of his problems and that that wasn’t going to happen. Late in the process I hit on the idea of using color to indicate where he was on a spectrum. Like everything horrible and terrible that he hates about himself and life would be red. Everything perfect and wonderful is blue. In between, there’s purple. I didn’t do it consciously. I saw the pattern of it, plus he’d written a poem he called “Blue/red.” I saw that I used a fair amount of red early on (I plan to go back and tweak this), then purple, then blue. Like PSU’s blue, for example.
Things got very blue with Natalie (her mood ring was blue all the time, he got a blue PSU backpack, it was spring and the skies went from gray to blue, etc.). Then I did something with purple and I thought: What if he slides back down the spectrum? Not a crash back to the other end but just an adjustment? Like if you’re riding a bike or running and you go really fast for a while. Eventually the pressure of pushing yourself makes you run out of gas and you don’t exactly quit. You go to a reasonable, comfortable place and that’s where you stay.
So the ending isn’t neat and complete but I think it’s satisfying. People might say, “Why the whole Natalie thing at all?” It’s there b/c it’s part of what changes him. He reaches something he didn’t think was possible for himself. Just b/c he didn’t hang onto it doesn’t mean it was a waste. We all have relationships that just ended. Thing is, he knew it was ending, which is more than most of us get.
Theryn asked what was next. If I can get some ideas, I want to get back into selling erotica and I have a book idea. I know, I know. Plus I’ll be editing RFM and I guess I’ll begin agent shopping again sometime this year. As I blogged before, Hawk thinks RFM is more marketable than WS. WS would be more popular in a mainstream way. RFM is aimed more toward a certain reader and a fair number of people wouldn’t like it. There’s a fair amount of soft drug use, there’s violence, there’s an awful lot of sex (not much graphic description but some four letter words) and Seth throws “fuck” around the way some people use “the.” In fact, the very first word in the Project 365 photo I took of the screen when I finished is "fucked." Yes. It's that frequent.
As I wrote to fredlet, WS & RFM aare llike my other children. I love them equally. Some novels are loved more equally than others. WS was my passion. The story I always had brewing that I wanted to tell. RFM started out as a very simple idea and blossomed into this incredibly fucked-up, bizarre little story that I didn't know I wanted to tell.
I blogged recently about an article that said all fiction is in some ways autobiographical. There's some of me in Jake (and in Thaddea), yes. There's a whole hell of a lot of me in Seth, Natalie and April. Even in Braddock. I think RFM is the closest I will ever come to writing a memoir or autobiography. It's closer to me than I expected it to be. When I felt like it was too close, I brought it closer. With WS, I pushed it away I think.
I used a lot of details from my life in RFM, esp for Natalie. Her apartment is my apartment. Her roommate situation is what mine was. She's an English major. She transfers schools after that spring 1992 semester. She has a crazy mother driving her away. Difference is Natalie did it the way I wanted to and she also had Seth to give her that push. The only person pushing me was me.
The details from Seth's childhood are mostly imagination. The feelings however are mine. The detail about the scars inside his sister's mouth. The fear that you never knew what you were coming home to. That's true. Seth's voice is pretty much my voice, only run ragged and roughshod. Jake's voice is older than Seth's, with different experiences. It's still similar to mine but not as close.
April is not nearly so close to mine but she didn't open up in the same way Natalie did. We don't even get her last name. She was supposed to be a minor character, a distraction. She ended up with third billing (probably tied w/ Braddock). She also gave me my ending and she got her belly button pierced. I think April is more how I wished I could be at that age in that place. She does what she wants, she has what she needs and she has a safety net. I also made her be from Erie, which is a personal invocation of "home." Not many people would get that reference and it's not important that people do; it's there for me.
The writing style is very different from WS. I developed a thing of dropping the subjects off my sentences. Helps keep from getting long pps full of sentences beginning with "I," for example.
I had some trouble w/ tense shifts. I kept slipping into present tense. I do use present tense in flashbacks b/c it helped add immediacy. Coming out of the flashbacks was hard. The climactic scene toward the end especially, since he slipped in and out of the flashback and therefore between past and present tense.
The book is structured by month. Each section does have chapter breaks. There are 18 total. There's no chapter break in the third section. It goes like this: January, February, August 1989, March, April, May. The story is set in 1992. I established it mostly through music. I did come right out and say it was 1992 near the beginning.
Music is intrinsic to the story. Seth loves music. When we first see him, he has "Don't Bring Me Down" in his head. Natalie's neighbor, whom Seth nicknames "Pink Floyd," is always playing music that can be heard through the walls (Pink Floyd was based on my IRL neighbor, whom I called "Pink Floyd"). There's mention of the new U2 album (Achtung Baby), Nirvana (Nevermind), Metallica (the black album) and Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes). There's classic rock like The Who and The Beach Boys (I didn't choose them arbitrarily either). When April asks him to recite one of his poems for her, he says he doesn't know them offhand. She says to tell her some song lyrics instead and he quotes "Bodies." He has a Clash t-shirt. Braddock has a Buzzcocks t-shirt. Near the end, he buys a guitar, thinking he can make some money by writing and playing songs.
I think that's enough deep discussion for one day. It's done. And now... editing.
I wrote 6k today (nothing yesterday; socializing). I'm over 95k. I won't be going over 100k. I'm on my last or maybe next to last scene. Definitely the last chapter. I don't know if I'm 100% happy with the structure of the ending and the ending surprised the hell out me. The general idea is the same. The last line (so to speak) is the same but the unfolding around it is completely different. He has all the information he needs to make his final decision. He just has to make it and do it.
Also it changes one of the themes, in a way. Whereas I originally had an "all better" kind of end for him it now ends with a "not all better but better" kind of idea. So the theme includes the ideas of "one step at a time" or "degrees" or "things fall apart even when you think they're fixed but you can fix it again."
You'll see what I mean.
Thanks April for not shutting up. You were right.
One piece of really good advice I got from "Janet Reno, Online Writing Coach" was when you're stuck or in doubt, think of the worst thing possible that your character can do or the worst thing fate (ie: you) could do to him and do it.
I had blogged before about how I felt this story is missing the oomph of a climax for the ending. Now April has insinuated herself back into the story when I'd already written her off and I'm wondering if she might not be this "bad thing." Maybe she's the oomph. I plan to write it and find out. Just let him make his bad decision and see what happens.
Here's where my quandry is: I'm wondering if this is the "worst thing that can happen" for Seth or for me. Am I making a smart choice for the story or am I sabotaging myself? Hey, it's just words. They can be deleted if they don't work. I was just thinking about the line between character and creator.
I think I was resisting having something happen at this point just so I could tie it up and say "the end." It was ending with a whimper and I seemed to be fine with that, sad as it sounds. So I think I already made the "bad choice" for myself -- a safe choice, an easy choice. Now my characters are coming to me and saying "What? You think it's that simple? Life is never that simple."
In a previous brief scene, Seth told Natalie he was trying to "unfuckify" his life. What if he succeeds? What if he's all straightened out, gets rid of his demons, etc.? Does he traipse off into the sunset llike we all do once all our problems are fixed? Oh right. Our problems are never fixed. Moreover, it's human nature to mess things up, even when we work hard to "unfuckify" things. So his girl is gone and everything went well and he loves her and let her go... and now his "sidedish," as the guys said, is still around, still there, still obviously infatuated with him, even if he doesn't get that. Did he really think he'd be faithful to Natalie or something? Even knowing he would never see her again? I mean, he had sex with April, went home and had sex with Natalie... so what if he does it in reverse? So what if she's probably as far as Lancaster on her bus out of town? He's a free man. So what if that voice comes back into his head? B/c that is the worst thing that could happen to him and it would be his own fault. It would fit in with the "going back for it" that he said he always did. He could beat himself up royally over that. Plus he has to meet with his teacher tomorrow...
Okay now I'm having fun imaging the possibilities. Like I said, I'm totally flying without a net. I don't know what's going to happen but it seems like Seth, April and I are going to find out together.
Only 1217 today. I know. Most people would love to have produce 1k today. I love that I produced 1k. What happened was that I cut the end of the last of what I wrote (saved it in a separate doc) and redid it. Still not sure what April wants. I have an idea but I'm not sure. I wonder if she's thrown the brakes on and that's why I did 1200 when I usually do twice as much lately.
Then again, I wrote a lengthy blog entry instead of fiction so my WC is probably the same ;)
Well shit. Someone's stolen part of my book ;) Well you take that and Good Will Hunting and that's kind of how it goes, plotwise. Well there's more to it than that but, ya know. Nothing's original.
Yesterday I wrote 2300 or so. I've written a little today but I'm not done yet. I have a scene that I didn't expect.
ETA: 2900 today. Today and yesterday I thought I hadn't written much of anything. It's like an out of body experience or something. I do the WC and I'm like, "I wrote that much?"
I don't know why this scene is happening. It must be something important. I think this one character just won't go away. Seth kept telling her to shut up. Now I think I have to do the same.
I was reading this review of a "how to write chick lit" book. They quote:
If you're comfortable writing autobiographical fiction, well, writing in the first person plus honesty basically gives you your main character — you. It helps if you’re funny and interesting and willing to humiliate yourself.
— Sarah Dunn, author of The Big Love
Eep! The review adds:
Most authors admit that although they’re not always consciously creating their protagonists in their image, sometimes they can’t help it. There’s a little bit of them in their main characters (or even their secondary characters), and that’s just the way it is. Nothing to be ashamed of.
But try to remember: you’re writing fiction. Of course, you’re going to draw on what you know and who you are; but don’t be afraid to veer off in a direction that’s completely unlike you. You and your main character could share some qualities, but she doesn’t have to be you.
So I'm an adulterous, haunted minister or a drifting sexually frozen murderer. In any case I'm a twenty-something male.
