What most writers of bad fiction have in common is this weird belief that an equation defines what they do. Before even writing a story, they break it into variables: plot, character, setting, dialogue.
Then they give each variable weight. One hundred percent of the time, they decide that “plot” is the most important, and that every other element of their story should serve it.
Bad fiction is bad because you can hear the plot cranking its mechanical way through every page. The plot’s screeches drown out all other sounds, including the writer’s voice. This effect is intentional.
The hack writer’s goal is transparency. While you’re reading his story, he doesn’t want you to know he ever existed.
His book is a “ripping good yarn,” a “real page-turner”; you “can’t put it down.” His book is five-hundred pages of people doing things.
After you read about those people and the things they do, you put the hack writer’s book down. You’re done. But you’ve gained nothing, and you’ve lost a few hours of your time.
The problem is, I don’t think the point of fiction is to tell a story. The point is to explore this inherent relationship between two human beings: the writer and the reader. The story is the bridge that connects them.
The bridge is important, but crossing it is more important. The bridge may be ornate and intricate, and its plotting may be second to none, but if it doesn’t go anywhere, none of that means jack shit.
Sure, there’s a craft to writing, but writing itself is not a craft. The craft is a means to a more important end. A work of fiction is about what happens on the bridge of its story, about the images the reader produces based on the writer’s cues.
Most of the time, when I think of bad fiction, I’m thinking of lowest-common-denominator shit that’s all about the reader and not about the writer. There’s another kind of bad fiction, of course: the arty bullshit that’s all about the writer and not about the reader.
Fiction is like love. It only makes sense between two people. Like love, fiction that only involves one person is narcissistic solipsism at best and masturbation at worst.
Masturbation might be fun for a while, but it lacks that peaceful bliss that comes after real, actual intercourse.
With masturbation, you get the exact opposite of that. You’re not happy after you jerk off, you’re depressed and guilty. (Although I suspect that might just be me.)
Fiction is a kind of “art.” Art is like love. If either or both has a point, the point is this: to help us feel less alone.
The barriers between people are immense. John Donne once said, “no man is an island.” John Donne was hellaciously, hilariously wrong.
The truth is, every man, and every woman, is an island. But we can, and do, and have to, deal with that. Everyone needs someone. Everyone needs something. Everyone needs a way to cope.
Art and love. Without either or both, we get lonely. We shrivel. We shrink.
Real human beings write stories. Real human beings also read them. When you write a story, you put what you know into it. That’s you on the page. Some aspect of you, at least. When you write a story, you translate some of your own personal weirdness into something another person might be able to understand. You feel a little less alone.
When you read a story, you’re communicating with someone you’ve probably never met. It’s not a conversation, but it’s communication. When you read a story, you identify with it on some level. It gives you something, and you integrate that something into your own life. You feel a little less alone.
A story doesn’t exist until or unless someone reads it. That’s the whole point.
I think the first time I attempted to write a story was about fifteen years ago. Late October of 1994. I was six years old. I’d been eyeing my dad’s computer, an IBM laptop.
I think it was one of the first laptops they made. It was pre-ThinkPad, part of the PS/2 line. It had a grayscale LCD screen that inverted everything. The command prompt was gray text on a pale background.
Years later, I found out most people saw DOS as white text on a black background, and I was shocked.
Anyway. October 1994. I wanted two things: to write a story, and to get on my dad’s computer. I told my parents that my first grade teacher had assigned me to write a story, and had specified that I use a computer to do this. This was, of course, not at all true.
I wrote the story and printed it out. I don’t have the story anymore. It was probably a pretty bad story. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember this: it involved a talking scarecrow. The file may still be on my dad’s laptop somewhere.
I built up a lot of files over the years. Wrote a lot of pretty bad stories, mostly about shit like talking scarecrows and swamp things and aliens. At first my files were WordPerfect files. Then my dad showed me how to run Windows 3.1 and I started using Word.
It’s weird to think about this now, but as a kid, I was a big fan of Microsoft’s stuff. I thought Word for Windows 6.0 beat the shit out of WordPerfect 5.1. When I first started going online, I used Netscape until I discovered Internet Explorer 4, which I considered the best thing ever.
I’d like to say that these days I’m too smart to have that kind of irrational love for a large corporation and its products, but I think my blind loyalty has merely shifted over to Google.
Anyway. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I “wanted to be” when I “grew up.” I kind of wanted to be a lot of things. I went through a bunch of phases.
Until I realized that physics actually involves a lot of math, I kind of wanted to be a theoretical physicist. Until I realized I wrote terrible code, I kind of wanted to be a computer programmer. Until I realized I was not funny and could not draw, I kind of wanted to be a cartoonist. Until I realized my parents would not be satisfied unless I went to med fucking school, I kind of wanted to be a writer.
I wanted to write fiction. I guess I still want to do that, but what if I can’t? The stuff I write is terrible. The stories in my head are much better. How do I convert them into words? Maybe it takes raw talent that I don’t have.
Not too long ago, I watched this interview with Quentin Tarantino. He was talking about raw talent.
“I always knew I had this god-given talent.” he said. “I knew I had been put here to direct a really great movie, so for the longest time, I wasn’t afraid of, you know, car crashes. I wasn’t afraid of plane crashes. I wasn’t afraid of getting shot, or accidents, or – you know, any of that. Because I knew I couldn’t die, because I was meant to direct a great movie.”
From this, one can conclude that Quentin Tarantino, though I like the guy’s work, is obviously kind of a douchebag. But what if he’s also kind of right?
Maybe some people are “meant” to do things, and maybe others are “meant” to not do things, and maybe I fall into the latter category.
Maybe I’m not good enough to be a “real” writer.” Maybe I just don’t have the talent.
Maybe I’m only good enough to be a hack. I would never want that, though. I want my shit to mean something. But is my shit all trite? Is my shit all meaningless?
I look up at the first several hundred words of this thing: “Fiction,” I wrote, “is like love.” What the hell is this supposed to mean? The shit’s dripping with pretension. It’s disgusting.
“Art and love,” I wrote. “Without either or both, we get lonely.” I imagine someone reading that, someone infinitely hipper and more clued-in than me. I imagine that someone thinking, “This kid needs to take his head out of his own ass.” I imagine that someone chortling.
Maybe I should go back and delete that stuff. Maybe I should go back and delete this stuff, too. Maybe I should delete this whole entry. Delete this whole site. Format my hard drive. Sell my laptop on eBay. Take the proceeds out of the bank and spend them on alcohol. Drink until I’m near-comatose, and then take a bottle of Tylenol. Wait for the liver toxicity to kick in, and then die.
No. I don’t have the balls.
Maybe I should go back in time. Rewind to October 1994, or hell, earlier than that. Rewind to 1988 and talk my mother into getting an abortion.
No. That’s impossible. Even if it were, it’d result in some kind of insoluble paradox.
My friend Hazel (whose real name is, of course, not “Hazel”; I don’t think many people under the age of sixty have that name, but that’s why I use it: I love quaint shit) does not read this site. She told me why, and this is what she said:
“It’s really morbid. Everything’s so morbid. You need to write some happier stuff. You don’t have to make it all so dark. Nobody wants to read that.”
I imagine that infinitely hipper and more clued-in than me dude reading all this, and thinking: “This kid is so angsty. The guy needs to chill out.”
And I mean, he’s right. Hazel is right. But my stuff is angsty and morbid because I’m trying to figure out and sort through a bunch of shit. I don’t understand what I was put here to do.
I, like every other living thing, am the product of countless cell divisions. From the moment of conception to the present day, a quintillion divisions, over time, came to define who I am. A quintillion divisions, over time, separated me from my origins.
When I was a single cell, I was just like everyone else. Everyone was just like everyone else. We were all the same.
When I was a single cell, there was nothing unique about me. I wasn’t even alive. (I guess pro-life assholes would disagree with that.)
A quintillion divisions later, and here I am: a distinct person. I have my own way of looking at things. That’s nice, but it also means I’m separated. Everyone’s separated. Because of all those divisions, everyone has an isolated point of view. Art, love – these are ways to reverse the divisions. Maybe not all the way, but enough.
I can communicate, but is what I can do enough? I can try to write. I’m not good enough at that.
Was I put here to create “art”? I’d like to think so, but that could be a fruity, deluded thing to think. I don’t know if anything I have to say is interesting, or worth saying at all.
Once, I was fourteen years old, reading a book. It wasn’t a great book. I think it was Children of Dune or something. My dad was pissed at me, at the time. I don’t remember the details of the situation.
We were arguing. I remember my dad grabbed my book and kind of tossed it across the room.
“You waste so much damn time,” he said, “with these novels.” Was he right?
I don’t have anything against my dad at all. He had his quintillion divisions, I had mine. He has his values, I have mine. We don’t always see eye to eye. But what two people do?
Cells never stop dividing. The older I get, the more isolated I am, the more alone I feel. My twenty-first birthday was a couple of weeks ago. Another year of nothing done, nothing understood. My quarter-life crisis rages on.
Here’s the hip, clued-in dude again, reading my shit: “Art, love – these are ways to reverse the divisions.” He chortles.
“My quarter-life crisis rages on.” The dude can’t stop chortling.