cold silence has the tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion

[intertribal]

I promised Lindsey I would write this entry.

I recently decided to re-write a series of books I first wrote in junior high and high school (I wrote one book a year).  They were really quite terrible in too many ways to mention, but I was also a teenager.  I wrote most before I read anything truly good.  I decided this mostly because I think I had some really fun ideas in those books, especially pertaining to politics and religion, which are my favorite subjects, and like I "owed it" to the skeleton of this seven-novel series to not just let it crumble in obscurity (born in lust, turn to dust).  I think I also decided to do this because these characters were people I knew, long-forgotten friends who saw me through my most hormonal, unstable years.  And I missed them.  We've been through a lot together.  I named the series after Walton Ford's "Sensations of an Infant Heart" (this is the only thing I've ever written to Harper's Magazine about - I emailed the woman in charge of the art department and said, "So I have this picture from your magazine of a chained up monkey strangling a parrot and I have no idea who it's by, please help?" and she wrote back, "Oh, it's Walton Ford.  What a picture, amirite?").  I think I knew while writing it that it was juvenile and half-baked and that I wasn't ready for the story I was trying to tell.

I started publishing short stories a couple years after I finished the last book of this series.  I don't feel very much for my short story characters.  This enables me to do to them what I could never have done to these first proto-characters, my Adam and Eve.  It enables me, supposedly, to view them objectively.  There are some that have stayed with me more than others, like Lizbet from "Pugelbone" and the unnamed narrator from "Intertropical Convergence Zone," because they were drawn from places close to me emotionally - Lizbet was drawn from my blood, the army guy from, well, my dad and Suharto and other larger-than-life Indonesian men from my childhood.  But most of them are pawns.  I like to think they're reasonably well-rounded, but it's entirely possible that they read a little cold and distant because of this wall I put up.  I put the wall up for reasons that I thought were good: I was way, way too invested in my proto-characters, it got in the way of the story, and in the end their characterization suffered for it. "Are You Hurting The One You Love," indeed.  I know that Kill Your Darlings refers to words, but after this series I decided to use it with my characters.  These characters' next permutation were still near and dear to me, but much less so.  Because I was also becoming a better writer throughout this whole process, I associated the technique with good writing.

And I think this affected the way I read other books and watched movies/television, too.  I stopped getting emotionally involved with other people's characters.  I had gone through a period where I was very involved in fictional characters - incidentally, at the same time I started writing my overly-emotional series - and I was embarrassed by that side of me.  Sure, there were characters I liked, a lot, like Dale Cooper and Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks and Starbuck and the Agathons from Battlestar Galactica.  I think I only ever fell in love with Billy Budd, of all characters, after the calamity of The Song of Roland (and yes, they all end up dying, always), and maybe a little bit with Yossarian.  It took me a long time to find a female character I genuinely liked, and then I found myself much more sympathetic to a whole host of them: Eleanor Vance from The Haunting of Hill House, the narrator of The Bell-Jar, April from Revolutionary Road, Lily from Run, River.  But for the most part I appreciated these books and movies for other reasons - words or stories or ideas.  A lot of my favorite stuff, like A Sound and the Fury and The Violent Bear It Away and almost everything I've read by Cormac McCarthy, were populated entirely by noxious, terrible people. I wanted to see their worlds collide, I wanted to watch them climb over each other and go up in flames, but there was no visceral attachment.

Then I decided to rewrite this series.  Around then I started watching The Tudors (I know, I know), and I got all invested in the tragic queens.  I've gotten invested in television characters before though - I think it's an effect of spiraling melodrama, it catches you up the way sports catch you up - so that in and of itself was not worth much.  But I did end up writing a story based on Jane Seymour and Anne Boleyn, because they wouldn't get out of my head.  And then when I came back to DC this semester, I started watching that free Netflix series, House of Cards.  And I "met" Peter Russo.

Everyone I know who watches that show - and my sample size is all male, for what it's worth - loves the main character, Francis Underwood, because he's "boss" and callous and cool and is in control of everyone.  I think Francis is evil and horrible and shitty, but I totally fell in love with Peter's character.  I would start episodes being like, "Peter, you'd better not [insert stupid thing here]."  And Peter is a terrible judge of character and an addict, so there's a lot of "Oh Peter Russo no" in the show.  Peter is weak, while Francis is strong.  Peter has big dreams and really deep lows, while Francis is always level-headed, rational, logical, focused on the prize.  At the time I wasn't sure why I loved Peter so much.  I decided later that he reminded me of who my male proto-character was turning into, and man, I always loved/hated that guy - and it recently occurred to me that my proto-character evolved this way because he's like the id version of myself: the volatile, angry and depressive mess driven by resentment and self-hatred.  Starbuck is the female version of this, which is I think why I like her.  And my female prototype, the stoic good girl, is my super-ego side that most people see on a daily basis while I work and study and listen to people's problems.  This is a surprising realization, to say the least (and not one I was at all expecting), but may go along the way toward explaining why I keep writing this duo over and over, until the end of time.

Organizing and planning the rewrite is like a drug to me now (the outline for the first book - thankfully I scaled it down from seven to three).  I do think that the edited/overhauled version has a lot of potential.  I think it reflects how much older I am now - the characters and their relationships and the context they operate in are all vastly changed, having been boiled down to their core and seen for what they really are: damaged people, in many ways, the full extent of which I couldn't quite fathom as a high-schooler.  I also think it picks at a raw nerve in me, and I've always picked at wounds.

I still can't shake the feeling, though, that real writers don't write this way - not the ones that end up living relatively healthy, balanced lives, anyway.  I know that Caddy was Faulkner's heart's darling, but Caddy was barely ever on-page and never heard from directly - which mitigates, I would think, the detrimental effect of an emotional attachment to one's own creation.  Because writing is business, right, it's politics and nothing personal?

Comments

[brendandetzner.livejournal.com]

The idea of you working on a novel is really exciting- like "I'm smiling at six in the morning" exciting, which doesn't happen much.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Aw, really? Thanks! We'll see how it goes - honestly, I have too many novel ideas.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Your description of Peter Russo and his terrible but understandable decisions reminds me of the person they have doing recaps of The Walking Dead on Tor.com, who genuinely seems to hate the show and everybody in it and think the whole thing's a colossal waste of time, to the point where I often wonder why they even bother. (Money, one can only assume.) The funny thing is that you would think the pressure of a zombie apocalypse would be easier to understand than the mundane pressures of everyday life, but I don't think it is, for most people--it seems to make most people stridently unsympathetic, like: "Just buck the fuck up, son! You know the score, here!" I want to point out that within the world of the show, this state of affairs has "only" been going on for maybe a year at most, but I'm not sure it would help.

Then again, this is one of the inherent problems with creating/consuming horror, isn't it? On some level, you know none of it's going anywhere good, so you tend not to engage with the characters, just for self-protective reasons. That's how people can sit in the dark laughing at the guys in Session 9's money problems, or Ethan Hawke's genuine belief (in Sinister) that his legacy as a writer is more important than his legacy as a father. It's easy for us to laugh at them, because we occupy the privileged position of being outside their perspective; we know the genre, we can see the ghosts, we can see "it" coming, whatever "it" is. We get to be able to tell Rick Grimes that if his eleven-year-old son can "get over" losing Shane and Lori without hallucinating and putting everybody in danger, then so can he; we get to be able to tell Andrea that shooting zombies and cutting a man's throat after just having had sex with him are exactly the same thing, because A) we've never been in that position and we never will be and B) false equivalency.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is what my mother's always talking about, when she says that horror raises moral calluses. Ah well.

At any rate: Yay, more writing! I've missed you. Keep going.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know what you mean - reminds me of the ol' laughing-at-The-Exorcist thing we discussed a couple years back. I think people have that reaction particularly when watching post-apocalyptic stuff, which as a genre seems to bring out the very worst of humanity - not only in the characters, but the audience. It's probably because no one wants to think about it too seriously. I always admired 28 Days Later for bringing up that there would be "No More Films" in this zombie-eaten world - I mean, everyone you love has died, everything is gone, so as the viewer it's easier to focus on how to kill a zombie and how to be a bad-ass, which usually consists of "no more whining!" As a writer I try not to abide by it, though. I'm not in this to write action movie scripts.

By the way, can we talk about Sinister? Because I really liked it, and I feel like people sort of dismissed it for whatever reason, even people who saw it in the theater and were scared shitless at the time (i.e., my friends). For me it was almost too scary, like Ju-On scary. Found footage generally terrifies me, though, so I think we're living in a downright golden age of movie horror (although this might just be my generation).

Oh, I'm still here - and hopefully once this degree is attained in the next few months and I start my regular 40-hr-week job (knock on wood), I will have more time to write! I am trying to be better about forcing myself to write stories, though - and plot novels. Ellen Datlow recently bought a reprint from me, which was super-duper exciting, especially because it's Lovecraft and I've come to realize that Lovecraft has all these elements I love: religion, heritage, truth, arcane knowledge, amoral infinite gods that I met for the first time in a book by E.M. Forster, of all things. It's nice to know not everyone has forgotten about me. I remember being really worried about that.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd love to talk about Sinister! I watched it over a couple of days, and had to have the sound down on some sections--the combination of sound F/X and music is absolutely full-bore terrifying. I loved so much about it, even though I knew exactly where it was going: Deputy So-and-So, the smartest guy in the narrative (I thought of you, because he's a very Twins Peaks sort of dude, isn't he?); the fact that the Sheriff was cautious, not actually evil; poor Dr What's-his-face from the University, suddenly realizing he's having a conversation with a guy who thinks all this shit is real. The woodcuts, engravings and partial fresco made me so ridiculously happy, and I loved the elaborate nature of Bughuul's honeytrap, the metaphor-into-reality of him "eating" these kids. The fact that we could see them and Hawke couldn't also had a very Ju-Onish charge for me. Nothing to dislike, overall.

(I may be wrong, but I think this is the same director who did The Exorcism of Emily Rose. If so, I approve of him removing the overtly Christian parts of his narrative and going for something a bit less proselytizing that nevertheless manages to convince on the Things Man Was Not Meant To Poke With A Stick front.)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yes, good ol' Deputy So-and-So was wonderfully endearing in a Twin Peaks Sheriff Department/ Dudley Do Right sort of way. All right - I'm glad to know you also liked it. I thought it was one of the smartest Hollywood horror movies I've seen in a while, and certainly the bleakest by leaps and bounds, partly because there was no redeeming "fun" factor that you get from watching young people who "totally deserve it" get torn apart in terrible ways by some monster or demon. This was like, "Nope, innocent people. Children. Deal. With. It."

Is it true that some of the advertising overtly mentioned something about not allowing little girls to watch it? I would kind of lol if that were true, but that might have just been an internet rumor.

[wendigomountain.livejournal.com]

I LOVE that U2 song.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

U2 song?!

[wendigomountain.livejournal.com]

Yes, on your "I'm listening to" status, "Electrical Storm" by U2.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Oh! Okay, sorry. I thought you meant the title. Yeah, "Electrical Storm" is incredibly good.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So now that you *are* rewriting these novels, how are you feeling about the characters, and how (if at all) are you changing things? And what are you changing? You said you were way, way too involved with them when you were in high school, and that then there was a distance between you and your short-story characters that let you do things with them that you couldn't do with the characters in the novels. So: how is it with you and the novel characters now?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I may be even more attached to my duo - they're more real to me now, not proto-characters but legit characters. What's interesting is some of my former principals have fallen to the wayside, and new principals have risen in their stead. That's not surprising. What I've tried to do is just be more honest about what these people, given these set of basic characteristics and impulses, would actually be like. And I think after getting to know many more people, I just have a better sense of that. I think neither of them are superheroes now, or even heroes really. They're both depressed and moody and "crazy," and the guy is belligerent and rakish and the girl is hypersensitive and codependent, and they're just both the type of people no parent would want their child ending up with. I worry somewhat about people actually reading it and thinking I'm "encouraging" the unhealthy and codependent relationship they have, since people can no longer seem to tell the difference between depiction and promotion, but alas.

Context-wise, this is one of those "It Can't Happen Here" stories about fascism in America. And I think I have a better understanding of the circumstances in which that might happen now - I know for a fact that when I first wrote this series, I had never heard of the Weimar Republic, because when I read "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic" in my freshman year of college, something really clicked for me. I think this is just a function of political science learnin', and a fascination with extremist politics of various kinds (from the Tea Party to Aum Shinrikyo to the Red Army Faction). But the whole political narrative is more developed now, and my antagonists are a motley bunch driven by a variety of often-competing interests. Some of them believe way more than others. They each have a different hierarchy of beliefs.

I guess what it boils down to is: I wanted America to have a reason to vote the fascists in. I wanted the status quo to be bad for other reasons. And this tied in well with my protagonists being much more damaged and unsavory than they were when I first made them.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

*nods* It really does sound like your experiences over the last several years giving you the tools to write the novels you had been struggling to write as a kid, then. I mean, you've [ETA: done] just a metric-ton more research on the mindset of and progression into fascism (or I'd even say simply authoritarianism), and, like you said, you've also just lived longer and experienced more people, so you know that much more about what real people who are codependent or belligerent or whatever are like.

I hear you about people confusing depiction and promotion. That's a real problem. I wonder if it doesn't exist more in genre than in literary fiction, but I wonder if I only think that because I hang out with genre folks. Anyway, eff that: you can't *not* be realistic in your depictions just because people wish X or Y didn't exist. So.

Well cool. Sounds like it will be an excellent set of books.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it doesn't exist more in genre than in literary fiction

I think it does, although I think horror is actually the exception in genre (see Gemma's comment above), because we expect those characters to be messed up (the alcoholic writer goes to write a ghost story in a haunted house instead of dealing with his problems head-on, etc.) - and there's a lot less room and expectation of heroism or good behavior.

But yeah, I could go on and on about this problem (except it will lose me ALL MY FRIENDS, so I won't). Although to be fair I think reading Catch-22 cured me of this problem. I had to read it for class, and I hated everyone I met in the first few chapters because I DID NOT APPROVE of their behavior, of the way they thought about women. But I had to read it, so I pushed past my initial revulsion, and now it's one of my favorite books. Though granted, if there had been no pay-off as a philosophical/moral treatise on war and violence, if Milo Minderbinder hadn't existed (one of my favorite antagonists of all time), if Snowden's death hadn't been written so beautifully - I probably would have hated it.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I see this especially in people with a social justice bent. And yet even if you were to try to write from a programmed, goodthink position, you could get yourself into trouble. If there's some ill that besets a minority community, due usually to structural discrimination in society, then if you have a minority character who's somehow affected by that ill, you can be accused of writing characters that conform to the majority-society's biased and negative view of minorities ("Not all [members of X group] are [Y negative thing], you know!"), but if you depict a non-minority affected by that ill, you can be accused of whitewashing the problem.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yup, pretty much. And I don't like it when all the women in a book are prostitutes either (although, see, that pretty much describes Catch-22), but I think you can tell the difference between a writer who's doing this out of sheer laziness and ignorance, and a writer who's doing it deliberately, and has reasons for it. I don't know. I'm not comfortable with the mainstream SJ approach to assessing fiction.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I think I told you I read this at the time, and I appreciated that you actually took the time to respond (and dedicate?) this to me. But when I read it, I was like, "Too complicated, cannot think, later, later," which has pretty much been my state for the past year. It is worse than usual. So many unreplied emails. Frightening. And I literally could not think about it such that I had anything substantial to say. Excuses, excuses, I know...but I really am that pathetic! :P

To be fair, I'm not sure I do now, either. But I'll say something, at least. The emotional distance makes total sense for you, and I'm glad you came to some realizations about it. I really can't claim to know what is 'good' in writing, but I will say that other writers (like Faulkner, who you mentioned) are not necessarily a stable judging meter, 'cause y'all are crazy. ;P The 'smart' answer is probably the boring one: moderation in all things--find a medium between distance and obsession. But it sounds like that's what you're trying to do? I would guess it comes naturally with greater independence and self-confidence/trust/etc, just like relationships in real life.

As for your realization about your 'id' and 'super-ego', I don't quite know what to think. It makes a sort of sense, to be sure, and I could just take your word for it, but I want to really get it, and I'm not sure I'm there yet. Is it that you are in some way attracted to your id self that makes you create this duo? Or...is it (sort of, distantly) like how my mother always blamed needing a father figure on why she married an older man like my dad, then realized that in personality, she found someone who related to her exactly as her mother had? Like, you seek out what you live with and know rather than something distant? Or something else entirely? Or just what you said, the strange relationship between the two sides of your self which I don't quite understand? But then, yeah, what IS that relationship?

Anyway, I hope you've found time to keep up with it. It sounds good.