Still-born

I wouldn't say I can't write one of these stories--a novel, for lack of a more precise term--but it seems after three tries, I should think about my desire to do so. Here is the deal.

The first was about a guy who had a recurrent nightmare of being watched from behind a curtain or darkened doorway. He would have the experience of this in, shall we say, real life, and that would be his last. The voyeur was one who just wanted to study, no kinky or scary or violent stuff involved.

I got to the point that it seemed to me the plot would be boring for anyone to read. Plus, my excursions into the character of the watched teetered--more than teetered--on philosophical exposition, Jungian archetypes, etc., not necessarily interesting for anyone except me, plus it was fun to have the plot turn upon itself. What would it be like to watch? What is it like to be watched? And these would be the central genre of questions that occupied the professional interests of the main character . . . who dies of his own nightmare made concrete by the voyeur.

The story started like this.

As my father instructed from behind me, I held the mirror at arm's length.

"Now," he said, "look at yourself. You at a distance. Can you see yourself as I see you from here, over your shoulder?"

I confessed I could and followed his every word despite not seeing the point.

"Tilt the mirror so you can see me. There. Now you see me. I am a different image. Because I am me, of course. But also because I am not you. Now, move it back so you can see you. It is not you in the mirror. But it looks like you. It is the image of you, but it is something or someone other. Here now, then gone. Get it?"

I confessed I didn't. And so it went like that. He had infinite patience. But I didn't have his gifts, his way of looking at the world out there as some kind of object that he could focus on, or not, and understand, by his way of seeing, that there was both sameness, unity. And there was difference. Other. And that, he contended, helped him in his personal life, which he said was all we had, our personal lives. The roles of father, businessman, friend, all of them, they were just different views of him but not him. It was this divorce from everything that helped his sanity, particularly in the final years when he became less, I would say, acute. And he said it had helped him since his mid-twenties when death, he was certain, stalked him. To keep that specter at bay or in perspective, my father returned to the mirror or some other method he had and the reminders of who he was and was not. He was able to categorize the images and the identities that went with them, he said, and he found peace, mostly, throughout his life. It was a quiet, distant, and sometimes lonely existence, from the outside anyway.

I am afraid the lessons didn't take all that well. But now and again I look out there as if in a mirror to see what it is that is there, or appears to be there. I try to see it separately, distantly, and not as a part of me. But I have not had the peaceful moments my father said he had. I look over my shoulder now, and I know he is there even though I cannot see him in detail anymore. I know he is there. And clinging to that, I suppose, has led me to try and try again to get it, that elusive subject or object or image lesson.

But so what? I stopped about half way through. I called it Followed.

The next project was called Vanishing.

"Don't leave blood, semen, or menstrual discharge behind you as you run."

That's how it started, about a privileged guy who just decided one day to disappear.

Or perhaps this would have been the start. I couldn't decide before I left this one withering in the incubator.

Aside from Percy Ignatius Weasley, who after all is a fictional character, it is inconceivable that just twenty-eight years ago anyone's real parents could have named their son Percival Franklyn and then gone off and died. But happen it did, and therein lies one reason for this someone's disappearance. Who wouldn't want to with a name like Percy? But that is perhaps too simplistic an explanation.

PF's adventures take him around the western US and then on to Europe, finally ending in a new friendship, or relationship, and the revelation of his truer self, not the same as the one from the life that he had been living. Other characters were involved, mostly to try to find him, and they too had their own revelations, including dropping out of the game of hide and seek involving PF. Search of self by self and others, as others discover themselves too, or something like that.

The problem with writing this one was, after less than a third of the way into it, I got bored. Now how is that? My main and other characters bored me! My readers could not have that, I mused, and so the project foundered.

The latest--A Serious Affair, for lack of a better working title--goes like this (ignore the numbers in parentheses):

Hal, charismatic and enigmatic in the prime of life, (1) falls from his horse leaving his wife, Lillith, and his mistress, Jeanne, to carry on. Memories of him and the preparations he made help them with their grief and more.

Each feels her loss differently, but Jeanne's commitment to personal, especially spiritual, development, plus the separate bequests from Hal, show that the women will cope and thrive better by cooperating to achieve what (2) Hal would have wanted.

With Hal's loving guidance, (3) Lillith is already more aware of her power to attract, yet her personal development is still held back by a life of near celibacy and distancing others. Lillith would give up this her private way to wholeness with Hal in favor of avoiding the pain of grief and just living a comfortable life, but for a crush on Jeanne and the money and emotional support Jeanne needs to realize Hal's vision, a small conference center to support leading edge thinking and action.

(4) Jeanne realizes that she has not only received important lessons but also a mandate from Hal when she recalls her memories of their times together. Having to deal with the real property he has left her helps her step beyond her troubled business and up to a higher calling. Although she feels she should Lillith alone and give her space for grieving and not focusing on her husband's other woman, she can't. Her own grief compels her to share intimacies with Lillith. And she needs Lillith's financial help. Jeanne faces new challenges in acting in Hal's stead as model for Lillith and the point person for a near-complete vision.

The eventual opening of Hal's conference center signals a change in Lillith and Jeanne's relationship as it has evolved since Hal's death. They discover a new beginning out of allowing destiny's (title?) passion to work its magic.

It doesn't sound bad, but isn't this also boring? Grieving women find renewal out of a dead loved one's ashes, or some such thing, plus there is this do-good, personal development center now up and operational as conclusion. The triumph of the human spirit--yuck! End of story? What if I spiced it up a bit by taking away the progress. Not everyone progresses, some regress, some have dark sides that sabotage others along the way, etc. Naw, still not worth writing, and not worth reading.

Where does this leave me? Well it is clear I have these three stillborn scribblings. I feel I need better plots, or as a writer friend has told me, "just tell a good story." Well, I like the stories and their possible development as a result of going further with them, but I can't get beyond the outlines and first partial drafts.

John Irving in a recent interview said that if you are not up to revision, you are not a serious writer. Well, what about not having anything to speak of to revise? What am I missing? I mean, what am I missing that these stories do not have enough in them for me to stick with them longer? to get to the point of making revisions?

Recently I have written exercises, each about a thousand words or so, and these have been immensely rewarding to do, to revise, to re-read and find there my own genius, perhaps something only I can appreciate. And I have put out some pretty good, if obscure, poems. They too have satisfied the urge to write, to get what's inside out. But these longer fictional works--conceived in my own head and not based on any biographical reality except perhaps my own knowledge and values, not things that happened to me or somebody I know--they have eluded me.

I have thought of going back to the longer works and writing in thousand-word chunks--dialogues, descriptions, scenes, background materials, streams of consciousness, whatever. Then I could piece them together, either by just dumping them into what I might call a new (for me) form of long fiction, or craft them together somehow during revision. Rather than start with the big picture/story and working it down from beginning to end in a long string of text, properly ordered and complete, I could start from the pieces and work my way up to the magnus opum.

The first work was one which discovered itself as I wrote it. That writing was satisfying until I asked if a reader would ever want to slog through all of that just to have a guy die and another crawl back into his obsequious life. The second had this discovery aspect plus a physical journey to organize the story, mostly the western states. But I sort of got stuck in Reno in a casino in the middle of the night of the first day. The third project never got beyond the core summary, although I had an idea of the first three or so scenes. And I had a sketch of the attractive 29-year-old almost-celibate, as told by a unisexual friend. Yeah, a little weird, but I had a promising draft, rich enough to qualify as a kind of literature, or so I think (this fragment I have posted).

I think I am still back with the problem of story or plot. My characters are interesting, to me. But they don't do anything interesting. Perhaps I am really attempting a character study or two, or should be in order to continue. But is a character study what I want to do?

To qualify what I said above, Followed had a lot of me in it. The two main characters had identifiable aspects of me. PF in Vanishing had less of me, although it could be argued that I have been vanishing, or erasing self in some sense, for years. A Serious Affair has as its main characters two women. I can't say either as currently conceived shares much of me. The progress, if that is what it is from novel ideas one through three, is increasing distance from the autobiographical. Each, however, is imagined, created through a process of thinking and developing as it, each writing project, progressed. Is this a kind of maturation, leading to something? and what?

What did each singularly lack? What made me think they were boring, or would be? First, each character I created was honest and true. They were who they were, and they were not bad, as in evil. In fact, one could say that each was true to him- or herself, and in that sense good, without tragic or lesser flaw. In the Affair project, the two women come off as goody-good! Cooperating on a project to save others, after and as they saved themselves. What is missing? Conflict. A villain. A character tic, or two, or more. Some spite, or maliciousness, an unhappy ending.

For example, what if Lillith caused her husband's death in some way, or she just watched him die instead of going for help? And the revelation of this sometime later in the story would have an effect upon her friend/competitor Jeanne, such as to put the project in jeopardy, or arrest Jeanne's will to complete it, or so forth. Well, this complication would be a development of the story, but for what purpose? To keep the reader from being bored? As the would-be author, this is boring for me. The story becomes like just any other psychological drama or soap. And if it did, that does not seem to be what I want to do. There is nothing wrong with that, but for me to do it, all the writing, organizing, and more, I have to have some stake. Money and fame are not attractive, nor are they realistic outcomes.

Which leads me to think that it is non-fiction that is my interest, rather than fiction. And it is this deep interest in bare and reasoned truths rather than entertainment or stories that try to disguise or cleverly teach bare and reasoned truths that has me writing, or trying to.

In the process of self-effacement, I have come to a point where I do not tell stories. Not about me. And I do not see them or remember them as I go through my days. It could be that the absence of an adequate story for a novel has something to do with my own arrested or blindered development, my own alienation.

I would have to say that it is not the hackneyed problem, writer's block, that I am talking about. I have the story, the plot, the characters, locations, points of view, and all the rest. I just get to a point where writing and completing the plan seems without justification, intrinsic reward. I could go on, but I choose, based on considered reasons, not to proceed down the corridor to the reception room at the end, or whatever the metaphor.

Now for the obligatory turn. It is possible to add additional "reasons" here, but these too are on a never ending path. That path must not be avoidance but punctuated by a stopping point or two along a way toward, toward the next. To pick one of these projects up again, to create a new one having learned the key--I need to be hooked, compelled--I cannot say.

The overall effort here has been putting understandings out there to look at, and for the reader--this writer being one--to take to any next step. This piece does just that; admittedly it does not resolve itself, nor does it report on the fates of the three incomplete stories. These are all stillborn; would that they and this reflection lead to being born again, born still--or just allow us to rest in a fuller sense of what is, what should suffice, for now.