Semi-Urban Cartography

The new year 2010 has brought it’s usual brood of bad weather outside and renewed writing focus inside. My desk is absolutely teeming with ideas, the pile growing beside the computer, the “kitchen sinks” as I like to call them are filling. I can’t seem to contain that story churn characteristic.

Unlike what I detailed in previous posts, this year has so far been a fertile time.

The organizing principle recently has been a new embrace of genre. An honest look at the markets says that it might not be the worst idea to try and find the influence of something other than the dying Gaul “literary” magazine. Internally, I could stand to do something with my stories other than meandering. This year’s dawning has coincided with a profound step outside previously sacred presumptions: that I know my stories cold. I felt a need to force new perspective. My standard, “I don’t need guidance” had to be set on the sideline. At certain times in my creative life, the word genre was profane, and the idea an abomination. We’re taught that as young, ambitious writers I believe: genre is an acquiesce to mediocrity.

The late author and critic John Gardner emphasized its importance thoroughly in The Art Of Fiction among other critical writings. A simple paraphrase of the controversial thinker’s ideas would be that genre organizes story. Simple. A common theme on my desk is, in fact, that of messy, unorganized stories. For some years I’ve been writing to the end, finding the story, having no prevailing structure, believing that just because the story is about marginalized persons and deals with emotions that it’s literature. As fiction becomes more influenced by cinema (an art form more directly related to and fed by a massive marketing machine) the idea opens in the storytelling class of creatives. Young writers once learning at the knee of Robert McKee, Syd Field and Joseph Campbell took to Blake Snyder in the decade before he passed, his book Save The Cat a revolution in teaching people the rules of genre. Almost self-help in its accessibility, Snyder’s thesis is much more concise and user-friendly: what you write fits into a genre, so you may as well use that to your advantage.

Inconspicuously, I picked up a book at the library in late December: Europe’s Best Science Fiction. It was an omnibus of fifteen great stories from across the pond (a great concentration from Russian and other Slavic nations) with the editors discussing how each particular fit into the canon — not only the country’s literary tradition but in the tradition of the richly upheld genre of science-fiction. I soaked up the book in a weekend, thrilled in some of the stories, much of the criticism and the what transferred from that experience pushed me a step ahead. I began organizing some of the loose, amorphous story pieces on my desk. The greater genre “science fiction” has rules but that isn’t a bad word. Those rules work in giving the writer (and reader, to some extent) valuable outline and guidance, it pre-establishes a set of expectations that are best trusted. Without embracing these rules, a few of these story bits would have already withered.

Below are two stories I’ve finished since the dawn of 2010 and how understanding genre took them from bits and pieces to fleshed out fiction.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Genesis:

I read W.G. Sebold’s neo-classical novel, Austerlitz because the cover was innocent and haunting. I fess to this first impression. The review in my local organ, The Oregonian was enough pushed me to buy it and a stack of Sebold’s other work on eBay which I read multiple times. Austerlitz possessed some of that beautifully, Germanic quality best written by Gunter Grass. The idea of one’s history being apt for metaphor, not being shy about feeling the weight of focus from the entire Western World. My favorite stylistic part of the book though was a scene utilizing simple security camera footage in a continuous loop. Stemming from that simple image, one I read four years ago, I wondered if a good story could be told entirely from the perspective of surveilance.

Of course, just saying a story is told through the eye of a surveilence camera isn’t enough in itself. It’s not a story actually. It’s a good jumping off place, a point of view, something even beginners are told to find. From that I had the unique challenge of cobbling together a decent story. Clearly my first decision had to be determining who exactly was looking out through that camera? Then to decide what or who were they looking at? Once I determined those entities I could finally write the story.

My inclination was to make a general statement on human behavior from the position of cold remove: whoever is watching is clearly in some culturally or socially superior position, however faulted or delusional. Whatever humanistic trait demonstrated by the intruders, they viewed themselves as comfortably rid of it. Or above it. Was the observer a police officer? An agent of the government? Could I hook into  an ironic turn and make my observer a simple bumpkin, taken for anything and everything without even knowing as much?

None of these were enticing enough to start writing the story. I made reams and reams of notes but wrote nothing. The first line was nowhere.

When I read the short story “A Birch Tree, A White Fox” by brilliant Russian science-fiction author Elena Arsenieva (whose English translations seem difficult to locate) my story fell together. It was a cool January morning a few weeks ago when I realized my fledgling story had to have a message. Not an overtly moral message so much as a quiet, lonesome missive launched into dark oblivion. The human intruders had to be obsessed with expressing something regarded as simple to an all-knowing and, importantly, inhuman captor but that would also captivate the reader. Instead of struggling to make that connection allegorical or metaphorical, I decided to make it literal. Thus a science fiction story was born where there was nothing. The inhuman captor wouldn’t be simply power hungry or evil. He or she would be extra-terrestrial and observing basic human movements like an other-worldly scientist over new bacterium.

Without unraveling too many details (or give away Aresenieva’s brilliantly poetic statement on humanity, for that matter) I learned that the story I was writing would work if it did two things:

• It needed to eschew the easy story line that the observed intruders I was writing about are breaking in to steal something of simple monetary value;
• And there also needed to be a gesture both symbolic and human.

To answer these questions I took The Beautiful Room Is Empty to another world. Another time when we as human beings were no longer the dominant species in the universe. When the concept of being a pack animal was our burden to bear on our backs.

What’s more human than the need to remind yourself of threatened individuality?

Here is an excerpt from the short story:

Where The Thing Is Native

Genesis:

I was watching OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) late on a droll Saturday night. I was pulled into a few moments of a documentary about a crew of travel documentary filmmakers. Something in a simple cutaway shot of a B-Camera operator shooting footage in an Andes village made me feel something. From out of nowhere I was sympathetic. I wanted to tell his story, whatever that story was. When I posed the story idea of a story about such a person, Lisa was lukewarm.

In fact, she said, “that sounds pretty boring.”

Her dismissal presented a challenge: just saying that I’m interested in the story of a B-Camera operator isn’t anything more than character. I spent a few quiet work afternoons sketching notes about my explorer character: he’s ambitious, he’s new to the crew we find him on; most importantly I concluded that he needs to find something. What I felt forming at my desk was an adventure story: naive hero in over his head in a strange place who makes an astounding discovery and fights adversity to bring it home. All of the hallmarks of a different sort of pulp were there but I wasn’t quite turned on by it. Frankly there is no real market for “adventure tales.” I go to a gym each day and that basic market research says that none of those kids are cutting their teeth on Tarzan. Unless it’s a “first person shooter”.

I decided to amend the genre while keeping the elements consistent. As I formed a story, I decided to change the “astounding discovery” element. Instead of a thing, I made it a place, one familiar to the naive hero but a quarter turn off. To heighten the intrigue and skeptical nature of my story, I made an eerie connection between the strange place and the comforts of home. Simple changes around the same core story I began. Only now I could move a little more freely with the subject and had some leeway to create.

What I got were six thousand, very well written words. I’m hardly one to be pleased with a first draft but “Where We Are Not Native” reads like a Depression-era, weird fiction story. My hero is stranded due to the cruel fate of nature, escapes isolation in the cold, connects to a strange host and the rest is fueled by simple human characteristics: savage ambition and curiosity. I look at where this story could have failed (still wary that it’s not yet published) and it would be just that basic story place. In spite of genre, I learned that the character motivations driving the story need to remain human whether or not the antagonism is.

The story simply wrote itself in places.

Here is an audio excerpt from this story:

In the end, writing genre makes me feel like a much older writer. Not in age (although my birthday looms) but in my approach to story and the mechanics of writing it. I imagine those old pulp writers, those more hard boiled story-crafters to be much like I am now: hunched over the keys, hungry to exact some living, breathing story from their bones. I imagine them ever aware of the next one on the horizon and where to sell it.

Conversely, it makes me feel like a much younger writer too. Younger, in that each story’s flight is real. It’s a part once embedded coming loose from its original mooring. I’ve never felt that before.