Category Archives: Fiction
Dearborn Street Sketch
Looking for something else entirely, I went down the rabbit hole of my external hard drive, which had been a labyrinthine dumping ground of folders and files and enough potential writing and design projects to keep me busy for years if I had the time to organize it all into something manageable and accessible.
While fishing around, I came across this Photoshop sketch that I’d worked up off a photo or Google maps shot three or four years ago in a similar onslaught of nostalgia.
I’d wanted to put together maybe a dozen or so sketches like this to breakup a story I was trying to figure out. I had a short story that I was working off of and wanted to make it into something else, something longer.
I had come up with this idea after reading Edouard Levé’s novel, “Suicide”. It was his last book, as shortly after turning in the completed manuscript to his editor, Levé took his own life. The novel is interesting as it’s narrated to the main character, essentially turning the reader into the victim of the title suicide. It’s haunting and puzzling, infectious and entirely successful in calling into question what it means to exist.
I didn’t suddenly want to write every book I had in my head in this style forever now, but there are two ideas that have followed me around for several years that lend themselves to the style. Oddly enough, both deal with death, just as Levé’s work did, although in my case, one is a violent death at another’s hand, and the other is a tragic accidental one.
I wonder what about this writing style, this voice, that lends itself to tragic subject material? The ability to so easily accuse and question within the unfolding of the narrative? The way in which it immediately makes the reader a character, and can borrow their own prejudices and experiences, their fears and doubts, without needing to put those words on the page? Both ideas are a collection of photographs and written scenes, but are barely more then bones and bullet points, and a few odd fragments. I’m not sure how the stories will work out yet, or whether they will at all. For now, at least for this story, this is all I have.
Emasculating Hemingway
An abandoned travelogue, a short story, a new appreciation for Hemingway?
When I was in college I came up with the idea for a book that I would call “Emasculating Hemingway”, in which I would travel the world and seek out the places and experiences Ernest Hemingway wrote about throughout all of his short stories and novels. Tying it all together would be the struggle for the average man, like myself, who had never been particularly big or strong or athletic, who had never felt “manly” to learn it firsthand from the epitome of manliness.
It was brilliant, I thought. I’d get to see the world, to read everything Hemingway had ever written, I’d write a book myself—one that tied together life, literature, travel and finding one’s purpose, one’s place. Brilliant.
But it never got much past what I thought was an eye-catching title and a few bullet points. Years later, working at Barnes & Noble, I joined a book group with some other booksellers. We read On the Road. I wasn’t impressed. I found it tiresome. It’s not my type of book. Sometime later I read the Sun Also Rises, and perhaps it was having read Jack Kerouac so soon before, but I hated it. I felt the same way about it as I had On the Road. It was the same story, thirty years before. Only there was no story. Nothing happened. There was no point. And I know, that is the point, but I just didn’t like it. I’m allowed to. Just because it’s a classic, doesn’t make it good, and it certainly doesn’t mean it will appeal to everyone. Hemingway is brilliant and I will always emulate his writing style (imitate poorly) and I will read a handful of his short stories a few times a year (Hills Like White Elephants, the End of Something among others), but I just did not like that book.
Then just the other night, a line popped into my head and having my computer nearby I wrote it down and then kept going with wherever the hell it was going to take me. I wrote a couple paragraphs, got stuck, and it being late, I fell asleep while trying to figure out where this story was going next. The next morning, I woke up and had no idea what I’d written about, but remember that I had been very excited at the time.
“The bulls were running, or so they had been told.”
Maybe not a particularly good opening line, but this is a work in progress. That’s the fourth or fifth take on that idea, and I’m sure it will change another dozen times as I work through what this story is really about.
The important thing is that I wrote it and with it came the café, and the others sitting around the table, the drinking, the girl… and it brought back the idea of feeling emasculated by the persona of manliness that Hemingway left us. I’m pretty certain at this point in my life that I will never write that travel book, but that doesn’t mean these characters aren’t writing their own version of it. They are at this café because they believe they should be, but they have no idea why or for what.
Ultimately, that was the idea behind Emasculating Hemingway, that we have to be the giant of man who drinks Scotch and smokes cigars, who builds things and goes fishing, who plays football on Thanksgiving while the women cook, because we’re men and that’s what we do!—but we don’t know why we have to be that kind of man, and we don’t know how to be, and more importantly, more terrifyingly important, is that it crushes us because we never will be that man. We’re emasculated and cut down by an idea that no one really lives up to.
That’s who these characters are, and perhaps who each one of us allows ourselves to become: men who cannot live up to an impossible ideal, and instead put on a show to pretend we have. This story is about how the false journey we set ourselves on in trying to live up to a dead man’s fictional standard—trying to live up to any man’s standards rather than our own—prevents us from living our lives honestly and leaves us missing out on the moments we deserve to experience for ourselves.
Maybe I’m writing that book after all, now as a short work of fiction instead. We’ll see. I’ll let you know how it turns out…
the Dangers of Nomenclature Slapdashery
In a story I’ve yet to finish to my satisfaction, I named a character Kevin. Didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. He was mentioned only once, and his exact role, his actions were never explicitly said. What happened between him and the narrator of this story was alluded to, and sure, anyone could figure out what had happened between them. But he—that name—was only mentioned once. He wasn’t a real character, I suppose, is what I mean to say. His actions were the character; how he influenced the trajectory of these characters’ back-story, that was important, that was the character. Kevin was the fog of a nightmare that these characters were trying so desperately to run from. But he wasn’t a character. His name didn’t matter to me.
It didn’t matter until I accidentally started writing a prequel of sorts to that story which made the Kevin character the third of a three-pronged attack on the main character’s sanity. It started to matter then because one of my closest friends is named Kevin. That makes me uncomfortable. Do other writers have this reaction? Do they have rules against naming particular characters a certain name? Do other writers refuse to use their mother’s or sister’s name for a love interest? Or their best friend’s name for a rapist?
This wasn’t supposed to be a character. So why not just change the name? What does it matter? Well, the problem now is that I’ve spent months working on both of these stories, and beyond what’s committed to paper there’s a hidden story for them all, a back-story that’s developed and played out in my head whether or not I’m actively writing these characters. This back-story is as real for me as anything taking place in the so-called “real world,” despite my realization that I’m making it up as I go along. This is why all writers are that special kind of crazy that makes us all so endearing and delightfully morose; we’re creatures of two worlds. And sometimes we lose track of which one is real.
Which is why this Kevin thing is making me really uncomfortable. But as I get ready to post the next part of my ongoing accidental story through Wattpad, I’ve realized there’s nothing I can do. Not after this long. Like I said, it’s been months. For months this guy’s name has been Kevin. This Kevin is a son of a bitch, he’s obnoxious, he’s entitled. He has no idea that what he did to this girl was a crime, or that he should be punished.
Looking at a character after this long, thinking about their name, is like seeing their name spelled out in front of me as part of a photo-mosaic puzzle that I’ve put together. In each letter is a thousand images and ideas and snapshots of what this character has done, what they’ve experienced, who they’ve interacted with and how they’ve come to exist in this small little story, this slice of their life that I’m writing. It’s all there now, it’s all put together to spell out their name. I don’t know how to change that, no matter how much I want to.
Gas Station Burrito 