Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 20

Genre

I don’t find genre helpful, whether it be
in music, film, TV, novels, non-fiction… I don’t care. Having it categorised
doesn’t clarify or change how it feels. That being the case, not only am I not
interested in telling people the genre of my own fiction, I wouldn’t know how.
I know that’s unhelpful, but it’s a skill I don’t have. I’d rather not do it at
all than do it wrong and get genrelords raging at me, which they’ll probably do
anyways because I can’t stick to the conventions of any particular genre.

The truth about most things you’ll read is
that not only do they champion the skills of the writer, they may well be the
only thing the writer is capable of writing. Any particular facet of a writer’s
writing that reaps praise, then, is somewhat paradoxical in that the style and
the content of the piece were the only way the writing was ever going to be:
all stylistic “choices” may well not have been choices but the only option
available.

You may also have experienced the pain of
trying to work out who wants to read your story. The last thing I want to do is
waste my time or anyone else’s, but neither do I get much out of: ‘I’m looking
for something that grabs me from page one. Something that draws the reader in,
conjures deep, intricate images in their mind. Something that’s snappy,
contemporary and original. I’m looking for character-driven fiction above
plot-driven.’

Count with me the number of expressions
that don’t have much meaning. Likely these kinds of sentences are so familiar
to you that you, like me, didn’t question whether or not they make sense.

I used to think I could only approach those
readers whose description of their own reading tastes I understood. It is with
great catharsis I assert now that I don’t know what I’m writing and you don’t
know what you want to read, but we’re going to do our best to find each other.

Any reader can say little more about what
they want/need to read than ‘I’ll know it when I read it.’ Why read if not to
be surprised? We know this, though, because of how seemingly difficult it is
for us to know how to predict what we want to read, which has much to do with
mood and timing as it does to do with taste, all of this based on our own
limited perceptions of them.

This is why Goodreads is a great way to
build a network of people who will read your stuff and tell you what’s good and
what’s bad about it in a manner of delivering feedback that doesn’t have you
losing your mind over every sentence of it. When it comes to feedback, whatever
general ramble a reader wants to give me works best, because it’s what is
aching to be freely volunteered: it’s what the text stimulated the reader to
want to communicate back. It’s the simplest type of feedback to produce and
also the most valuable. A weird thing happens where I’ll read feedback, re-read
the story, and feel like I’m reading the story as the reader. It’s cool, and reveals a lot of new things you didn’t
know you need to fix, which is not worth panicking or beating yourself up over;
it is worth the joy of creating
something even better than you knew possible. Right? Otherwise you would have
done it yourself. The storytelling process has even more new joys to provide!
If you choose to see it that way.

I always had the core perception, since I
started writing, that I wanted to be the kind of writer whose books you wanted
to read regardless of what they were about, because you’d become familiar with
my approach/ take on things and if it met your tastes, you’d be happy to see
what I’d chosen to take on next. Who wouldn’t want their readers to read
everything they’d written though, right? Maybe it sounds like a redundant thing
to say, but the point is I don’t want to assign—and by the principles outlined
above, nor am I really capable of assigning– my writing a definite category that
prepares you in any way for what you’re about to read. But I like that—or at
the very least I’ve made peace with it!

No genre has a solid definition, no manner
of ensuring a piece of fiction is or isn’t within its boundaries, and if it is,
if it stays there or not, or whether or not a reader wants or doesn’t want this,
and it definitely doesn’t matter in terms of what messages/effects the story
delivers. I saw a review of the awesome film “Whiplash” that said ‘I genuinely
felt like I was watching a sports movie.” Yeah, but you weren’t. Or ‘No Country
for Old Men has all the tension of a horror film.’ Yeah, but it isn’t. These
two examples being the case, no genre does or does not guarantee… anything.

As a writer you’ll get into situations
where you’re forced to come up with a genre for your piece or a writer whose
work your work is reminiscent of, in which case, fine, but don’t worry if, as
an addendum to anything you write to this effect, you want to add “-ish?
*confused shrug*” at the end. Flip a coin to see if the person receiving your
categories agrees. It has nothing to do with how much you understand the
conventions of genre, or whose writing style you are invoking in order to
create your own prose: these are chaotic, subjective and simply daft questions
to answer confidently.

I’m not denying genres have conventions; I
just hope everyone worries about them a little less.

On (Mostly Writing) Advice

Have you ever taken advice? When someone
uses the imperative on you, have you ever obeyed? Or, more likely, did you do
nothing/ the complete opposite?

When people give advice, they’re generally
giving it to their former selves, or they’re using the opportunity to educate
themselves on how they do a particular thing. Some material does transfer, but
quite poorly when given in an advice/ list of rules format. The most powerful,
perhaps the only true way to give advice, is to live by example.

Everything I’ve gotten better at, I’ve only
gotten better at when I feel comfortable to interact with the skill/ the job/
the situation at my own pace, in a relaxed manner, “listening” for what I enjoy
about the thing and heading away from what I don’t enjoy about it, and in so
doing, finding the niche and the personalised skillset. Everything I’ve ever
had to do that I didn’t enjoy, I’ve always managed (or had the opportunity) to consider
what value the activity will provide me/ loved ones/ society, so that I can
enjoy this enjoyable secondary effect of the primary unenjoyable activity.

There are so many lectures/talks and books
about how to master/ improve things that no one understands, for the simple
reason that there’s so many good properties we have that we don’t know how to
accentuate and would so love to accentuate that we’re willing to believe
someone really has the answer. “We found something remarkable: 98% of people
were better at performing X when they thought about Y.” There’s no way for me
to know in which camp I sit: 2% or 98%. If I think about Y and don’t achieve X,
even so, I don’t know which camp I’m in, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll naturally
think there’s other people out in the world achieving X more happily, more
creatively, more efficiently than I am, and feel demotivated. The only viable
secret to happiness, creativity, efficiency, motivation etc. etc is leaning
into innate rhythm.

There are as many kinds of writers as there
are people, and there’s nothing any writer necessarily does or doesn’t need to
do. If I don’t want to (though I don’t know why I wouldn’t), I don’t have to
learn a single new word in order to tell a story. I could get through a hundred
novels and never use a metaphor—likely I won’t, but if I thought that was the
best approach, who’s stopping me? If it was an innate feature of my voice,
would anyone even notice? (Did I use a metaphor in this post?)

Apparently, in Donald Bartheleme’s writing
class, students were forbidden from describing the weather, something which
seems so critical to mood and tone. Marilynne Robinson has never assigned a
how-to writing book to her class.

The fact is, if you’re learning a skill,
you’re not learning how this skill is to be performed, but how you perform it—in
this case, not how people write, but how you write. In order to discover that, you
follow your intuition– maybe the only advice worth taking.

I spent many of my first learning-to-write
years feeling bad that writing wasn’t making me feel bad, since most lauded
writers agonise and sigh over the much-sought-after career they’ve luckily
managed to achieve/ toiled away at, and those who say they’re getting paid to
do something they would do for free are often scorned for their lack of ability.
But I think whether or not you enjoy writing or write what you enjoy is a
matter of choice, and it’s to everyone’s benefit if you’re happy. I just don’t
get who would say ‘Wow, I hate this. I’m free to choose anything but I think I’ll
dedicate my life to this thing I hate.’

When it comes to most skills, cherrypicking
from methods and accentuating your skill subset is not only absolutely fine but
to be encouraged. As long as you’re practicing and actively seeking to improve,
it’s going to happen.

The biggest writing joys I’ve had, even
just this year, are the following epiphanies:

-         
I really like it when this
writer uses mythological layering to enhance the resonance of his story. I mostly
do my research after the story, and when I try to impose a structure on the
story afterwards, it always feels forced. Not only that, but if the story isn’t
interesting in spite of this layering, there’s a danger it relies on
interesting structure to mask poor storytelling. And if I didn’t need the
structure to write the story, what good is it doing anyway? Wait: I could write
high quality fiction without ever using some clever structure?

-         
It’s so cool how this writer
pastiches noir fiction/ fantasy tropes/ sci-fi. They obviously grew up
voraciously consuming novels in this particular genre, and recreate its
conventions with love. I don’t know that I’ve held interest in any one genre
long enough or with enough attention to effectively pastiche it. I hope no one
thinks less of my stories if I never do this. Wait: I never have to do this?

-         
This writer is concerned with
the future of fiction. I see they have gone to great lengths to find innovative
narrative structures. What a huge mental exertion that must have been! I wonder
if I would be capable of finding a story format that hasn’t been used before.
Wait: I never need to do this?

-         
This writer’s prose style is
really poetic. That’s cool, I guess, and loads of people like it. But my least
favourite thing is lack of clarity, and purple prose has a tendency to
obfuscate. When I do this, it’s a sign to me that I’m scared my story isn’t
saying anything. If it isn’t saying anything, I need to work on that, not on
alluding to depth that isn’t there. Why would I write in a way I don’t talk? Wait:
I never need to write purple prose?

In so narrowing what I don’t want to do, I
operate freely in the space that remains, and readers get a good sense of what
to expect when they read one of my stories, so this has been a beneficial
process. A story doesn’t need to be tough to read to express something difficult.
It’s the same with other things: you could be a jazz or classical pianist, a
100m or marathon runner, one type of sports guy on the pitch or some other type
of sports guy, like, maybe not even on a pitch. When you hone your scope,
everyone’s thankful, you specialise and get better at the things you like doing
and discard the rest.

And so on and so on:

-         
Writing longhand vs typing

-         
Plotting beforehand vs writing
into the void

-         
Loving your characters. To me
the idea is essentially meaningless unless it’s saying “Care what happens in
your story/ who it’s happening to/ where it’s happening”, which is a broader
almost useful statement, but then you realise it’s just common sense. I don’t
judge my characters and I try to see where everyone’s coming from, even if I
don’t agree with them. That works for me, but who knows…?

-         
Killing your darlings: the
WORST! It’s not killing darlings; it’s culling deadwood. You’re cutting out
what doesn’t work and that too is an enjoyable process, because what remains is
that much stronger having shed the bland, the directionless, the red herrings,
and so on. I don’t like it when writers say that their first drafts are “bad/ shit”
or what they’ve written “stinks”: it’s like, calm down. “Not there yet” is
kinder, and better indicative of what it feels like to read something
incomplete. If you write like me, ie, not knowing where you’re going, this
material is inevitable and has nothing to do with how good or bad a writer you
are, because the story creation process is iterative. Does the first half
predict the second half perfectly, for example? If it did, it probably means
you weren’t adventurous enough, didn’t hold off enough in order to let the
story tell itself (or appear to.) Some characters won’t have gone anywhere.
Some story strands never got resolved or stopped being relevant. Some info was
dispensed in a better way later in the story,
and some of it wasn’t as important to the reader’s understanding as you thought
it was. You’re not bad for having written something baggy on the first draft:
the power of what you end up with is all to do with iteration above first draft
writing ability. Write, draft, edit, re-write: no one ever seems to attach the
same meaning to each of these words. To me, they all fit into the overall act
of “converging.” Through these components, you converge on a good story, and
anything before “convergence” is “not there yet.”

Fiction gets you high or it doesn’t. All
depends on who you are, and hopefully fiction challenges that perception
depending on what gets you high. And really, all any writing technique does is
maximise the efficiency of your writing process, but anything can be smoothed
out later, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t matter how you write at all.

I could just do this all the time: a
non-researched, simple-worded, no-prior-structured rambleathon, and it would be
just fine. Not to say I’m not doing anything. In terms of fiction, plot,
dialogue, logical flow, characterisation, setting, insight… all these concepts
need to be addressed, but I can choose how I go about addressing them. Reading
a lot and writing a lot are super important, so it’s not like I’m not putting
the hours in, and fiction/non-fiction, news articles, overheard conversations,
personal experience and (my favourite) scientific papers  inspire stories, so it’s not like I’m not
absorbing and learning; I just get to choose what to absorb and what to learn. You
feed the machine what you want and guide what it later spits out.

Not only that, but your stories should stay
true to the things you enjoy reading and learning about, should ideally stay
close to your life/ things you can relate to, in order to create good prose.
But writing need not be painful or head into forced directions or use
unfamiliar and uncomfortable techniques—generally speaking, the less it does
this, the better! This blog post, for example, is coming out of me quite
naturally, but it summarises things that have taken me years to learn and to
develop the confidence to express: the actual typing-it-out is not the official
gauge of how long this post took to make: it’s been distilling in my head for a
while.

Who knows? It’s best to stay open, naturally,
and I kinda knew this before; I’ve just become more willing to stop trying to
be all things to all women, and I can tell my work is improving as a result.
And yet, for example, I doubt there’s a single word in this blog you didn’t
already know. I have a massive list of 1500+ words now that I’ve collected from
books I’ve read, and I do try and use them when relevant, but I inevitably take
them all back out again. I guess this is just how I write, then. But the more
YOU you are, the less competition you have (said Bill Hicks), in any field.

In the spirit of giving advice, I’m
probably just trying to tell this to myself. But what writer would write if not
in part for the act of self-discovery?

�

Guest Post by Daniel Clausen

Hello folks,

Today I bring you a guest post by Daniel Clausen, who reviews the last book written by his late writing teacher, Lester Goran.

Enjoy :)

There are No Good Stories at a University (Lester Goran’s Bing Crosby’s Last Song)

The following is an excerpt from an extended book review of Lester Goran’s book “Bing Crosby’s Last Song.” The book review is written more like a creative essay / short story than a book review. If you are interested in reading the entire review, you can do so here.



When I knew Lester Goran from 2002 to 2003, he seemed to me an offensive creature – on campus, in his writing. Sometimes, he seemed like he was trying to be offensive on purpose. In class, I think he openly called college and writing a “racket.” My memory isn’t clear on this, but I think he also said he would probably stay at his job until he died because after growing up in the projects a racket like tenure was just too good to walk away from. College was an insider’s game – you played the system and got rewarded. Something like that. I don’t need to make up bad things he said about universities or university teachers – he put most of his ideas into words through the mouthpiece of Daly Racklin in his last novel.

*

I ask Lester to listen in on a scene from his book about the University of Pittsburgh. This scene takes place as Silk (an old boxer) and Daly are walking through the University of Pittsburgh, as kind of tourists.

Silk has just finished telling Daly about his troubles picking up college girls when he was younger. He says that he would often try to pass as a college student to pick up a girl, but that once they started talking he couldn’t stand to listen to them.

You can read this part starting on page 258.



“It made no sense.” [This is Silk talking.]

Daly laughed. “Don’t say that too loud, they’ll put us out. You’ll be closing down a racket going for centuries, them what thinks they have the superiority handed to them by paying tuition, and them what believes the propaganda and accepts the crumbs from the table.”

“They’re dumb as I am most of them around here, and I can’t think worse to say of them.” [this is Silk talking again.].

“Now you got the secret, only you not knowing that is what keeps them in place.” [p. 258].



I tell Lester: “This is you talking through your characters.”

He seems red and drunk and obnoxious to me now. I don’t want him to deny it to me. College was always my holy place, warts and all, there are few places holier to me. I want to slap him across the face and shit in his crappy little bar. Irish Club be damned.

But you can’t slap a dead man, and there’s no point shitting in a fictional bar, so there it is, and I stare at my reconstructed version of him, red and drunk, and about to say something and I let my image of him collapse.

He used to say there were no good stories at a university. I tend to think the same thing about bars.

*

Here is a better insight on the university – something that makes Lester’s more than fifty odd years as a writing professor seem better. Daly says, “College felt like an extension of St. Agnes, priests, brothers, classes in religion, an extension of being good and virtuous – and good ain’t easy, as we have come to know, right?” (p. 259).

“So, Lester,” I say, “there is nothing sacred or holy about the legacy you left at the University of Miami? It was all just racketeering and passing the time, collecting paychecks, and using the written word to remember the good old days in Pittsburgh?” I ask it, not knowing what he would answer, what he can answer.

Here’s what he writes about the Irish Club: “the Irish Club and its visionary drinkers, a child’s city on the hill” (p. 201). It’s hard for me to read a passage like this. I don’t think of drinking as visionary or child-like, but rather as sinful. Let every drunkard become a pot-smoker is my motto.

Perhaps he was being sarcastic. I don’t think so, though.

Frequently Predicted Questions

I’ve contributed interviews to a few blogs and such, but there are questions I thought maybe someone might like to ask me but hasn’t, is too afraid to ask, or maybe there’s even things about me I want to tell you that hadn’t occurred to you to ask. Or maybe it never even occurred to you to ask me anything, and maybe this is your first time even hearing from me: so here’s that!

Likely I will think of more, or you will, and I can do more of this :)

Who (the fuck) are you and why are you/what business do you think you have writing?

I’m a process engineer currently living in Oslo with my same-aged, happier-faced husband Juan and our collection of stuffed toys, books, videogames and empty cava bottles.
When I was 22, I wrote a short novel. I wrote it way too soon after what it was about and it had way too big a scope for a first project (I can see now.) I showed it to a few family members who appreciated it and encouraged me- they will remain the only people to ever see it. I’ve kept up writing to build my skills to get back to writing about what that first novel was about, and I’m still trying to get back there today, three/four years later.

How much money do you make?

Let’s just say that I recently signed up for a Netflix basic package ;) Well, we’ll see: I’m still on the free month. Fiction is where I take risks, not life.
I would love to operate some sort of pay-what-you-want thing on my books. I think you can do that with Smashwords, but I already learned how to use Lulu, so… another time. Making money for my writing would be nice. Nice things are nice and nice is nice. But more than that I’d like you to read my stuff!

You are a self-published author amidst a sea of self-published authors: why should I bother reading what you’ve written?

Short answer: I can assure you I work hard on my books and read voraciously and widely. You can trust that my writing is good quality and my insights are original enough and not yet available in the literature in their given form, to the best of my knowledge, which is really why I read anything. But likely any self-published author would tell you the same. I’m at the stage where it’s difficult to break out of the voice-sea, and to do so I rely on new readers taking a chance on me, so please do :)

Where do I start if I want to read what you’ve written?

Sinkhole is a bunch of different stories that still seem to cover the wealth of my favourite topics (eg. alienation, social justice, how to convert corpses into useful products.) If you like Sinkhole, you’ll probably like Rude Vile Pigs. If you like Rude Vile Pigs, you’ll probably like Saxual Healing. If you like Saxual Healing, you’ll have to wait for ITALO! And if you read them all, there’s fun to have discovering the links between them :)
In fact, if you kindly PM me, I’ll probably give you any if not all of my books for reviews. They do convert to sales eventually (I’ve seen it happen), sales that you would be personally responsible for generating through your support :) Oh! But can you wait a bit? I’m doing 2016 revisions of Findesferas, Sinkhole and Rude Vile Pigs, what with a year+ of author feedback!! I’ll be in touch :D

Any advice for indie authors?

Loads! Here’s the latest:

- You’ll learn that there are feelings about creating fiction that are inherent to the process and not the stage of your abilities, fame or income: is there a point? Am I any good? Can I do it again? Did I ever do it before? All of that. It’s an integral part of writing, but when people say ‘Hey, if you don’t want to experience this, don’t write!’ even if we ignore the general principle that tough love is bullshit, I don’t agree, because doesn’t anyone in any job sometimes feel like that? Haven’t you felt the same about your job sometimes?

- If you still want to write in spite of the obstacles, read every day and make sure you get enough sleep.

- There are only three things I’m guaranteed to do every day and writing is not one of them, because I’ve learned that this eliminates as much guilt as possible from the creative process, which is perhaps the most important part.

- Read what you enjoy and what challenges you in an enjoyable way: this is how you develop style, not by fawning over books you didn’t “get” or reading only daunting things all the time- that’s how you waste your time and the time of others! Again: you may need to do this for a while to learn it’s a waste of time, like I did- in which case, because of the time you did it, you learned something then stopped, so it wasn’t really a waste. Like staying in a bad relationship, reading half of In Search of Lost Time or watching a season of Breaking Bad.

- If your incentive to write something was “Fuck this/these guy(s)”, and you finish, and the only message is “Fuck this/these guy(s)”, it’s not done. Though I’ve never seen this prevent people from loving a story anyway :)

What’s coming next?

ITALO!

Other stories are incubating, and I am looking back at them while intermittently writing and rewriting and rewriting short stories.

Will you be my friend?

If you made it this far, I already am!

If you didn’t, I already was- but you’ll never know ;)

The Indie Author Manifesto

Pfft- I’m not an authority on writing. I recently read Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, and after presenting a bunch of rules, she acknowledges that any or all of them must be broken if doing so improves your writing. So the below is not a manifesto: it’s just some stuff to think about. You do you :)

1. Read and write more than the average reader.
2. Read just to read. I don’t know what “breaking stories down” means- probably just that you read stories you enjoy more than once so the underpinnings of it become more apparent. (That sounds cool!)
3. Don’t read to harvest vocabulary or see what writers can “get away with.”
4. Everything about the way you live and the art you take in should be absorbed naturally through openness to art and new situations, in order to create natural, plausible prose. Forced fiction leads to jagged starkness on one end and eye-roll-worthy pretension on the other. (I’ve produced both.)
5. Everything can be written about by a skilful enough writer. So, no need to pick fights or run through dark alleys in order to make interesting things happen to you.
6. That you (believe you) are an authority on what you write about is given by your having written about it- so best not to explicitly point that out.
7. No piece of writing is perfect: “style” and “content” make choices and eliminate options that may be more preferable to a certain type of reader, but the nice thing is that the writer, having spent way more time with their piece of text than most if not all of their readers, is much more conscious of their text’s limitations. Most readers won’t notice the limitations, and most that do will be forgiving about it, because pulling the wool over someone’s eyes is part of writing fiction: it’s a trick. No fiction really happened. But imagine you’ve written a story and you’re worried it will make the reader think about orange penguins, so you have a character say ‘Yeah man but like all this don’t have jack shit to do with orange penguins.’ (Why do I think they would taste like Starburst?) Uh-oh! Your insecurity is hanging out, right??
8. You don’t exist to bring more of another author’s books into the world- especially if that author is Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, EL James or Stephenie Meyer. (Because I WILL read YOUR book. Does anyone really believe that the only reason someone would hate a book is because they didn’t understand what the author was trying to achieve? I get it AND I hated it. Lose-lose.)
9. Write until you have your own voice, which, if you’re not forcing anything, will develop through your own unique taste imprint. This means, when you’re writing, you won’t really know why a character says X or does Y, but they’re part of your imprint, and you have to trust that- at least until the first draft is down.
10. There are so many books in the world, enough to entertain any given reader for a thousand lifetimes. Your writing must do more than entertain, then. You don’t necessarily need to know what it is you’re saying- and you may say different things to different readers- but you should intuitively feel your story has “depth.” Show it to some people you trust who can tell you yay or nay.
11. Everyone has just as much access to Google Maps and Wikipedia as you do.
12. Everyone you interact with, within the indie world- reader, blogger, fellow indie author- has their own voice that they too would want heard as much as you do, if not more. There are more platforms being built than people standing on them. Everyone can’t listen to everyone. Everyone can’t even listen to someone. But treat everyone kindly, and don’t get mad at yourself or your abilities if you don’t gain widespread attention, especially in the early years. The indie pool is tiresomely diluted, so why would it necessarily be a reflection of your abilities that people weren’t reading you? It’s hard to find you. It takes a long time and a lot of patience, patience meaning waiting longer than you had anticipated for something and relying on belief that tides will turn.
13. All the above being said: yes, there are many voices and not all of them can be heard. But encourage and celebrate other writers, because you would want them to do the same for you. And, if each of you have practiced enough, you have headed down paths significantly different that there’s no way you can be considered in competition with each other. No one is your invisible enemy holding you back: nurture no bitterness, not in life nor in your writing, that suggests this.
14. People know when you just want to be heard more than you have something to say. The ones who never stop doing this won’t make it. (In most cases!) Simply because the life of an indie author is so tough that desire for fame or money, as the sole motivation, doesn’t have enough meat in it. A lot of the indie world is a shouting match, but in the noise’s interstitial space is the giving of gifts. (Space in the noise? WTF, 2016.) Make things that you believe someone, for whatever reason, would ultimately be happy to receive, and in the receiving richer.
15. People > Books. I know: took me way to long to realise that one, and some interactions get me doubting again, but it is definitely true. People have the potential to do and say and achieve new things; books don’t, or if they do- in light of new events, as they echo through history- the scope to do so is much narrower. People also have a shorter shelf life. (And an echo through history won’t keep you warm in the middle of the night. #Unimpressed. Idea for a story: after World War III, it’s just a bunch of cockroaches reading charred self-published books…)
16. Things to take seriously: the vast statistical improbability of overnight fame and fortune, or if achieved, its well-documented inability to bring the happiness its recipient anticipated.
17. Things not to take too seriously: self, life, opinions, personal failure, other people’s success, inspirational quotes, earnest advice.

Not on the list: spell properly, use proper grammar, don’t plagiarise- not from Shania Twain or anyone. Because come on, man, if I had to even point those things out…

Looking for horror short stories!

Dear you,

In the name of good fun, author Matt Williams is looking for horror short stories for a collection.

Please pass them on to him or me, or let either of us know if you’re interested as well- would be nice to see who is keen!

That’s all. Get in touch. I am here :)

Should you read self-published books?

Praise

The best
self-published material I’ve read is far better than the worst traditionally published
books I’ve read. This is the criterion that lets me know that good
self-published material is “publishable”, but the writer has simply fallen
victim to the statistical unlikeliness of a publisher or agent taking a chance
on them. Or, the self-published writer has considered that books are sometimes diminished
in their greatness through the editing process offered by the traditional
publishing route (though less often than not, I’m sure.) Also, if a writer
wants a greater involvement with his or her business model, self-publishing is
a great option. Failure to traditionally publish is not the only reason writers
pursue self-publishing. More importantly: artistic quality is not the single
deciding factor on whether or not we should read indie authors, as I’ll
explain.

Self-published
authors, who have a tough time finding guidance, are a little too free from
restrictions: the freedom offered by the medium is seductive. The
Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that those who are inexperienced at a craft
likely overestimate their ability. Young writers, being unaware of a craft’s
intricacies, can underestimate the qualities that an artistic work has the
power to effect. If you don’t know the craft, you don’t know you don’t know it.
Thanks to this effect, crude (ie. unpolished) self-published material is
inevitable- though honestly in a way smaller dose than you’d expect, and I’ll
also mention why this is fine anyway.

Literary agents
and publishers do a great thing in that they provide a benchmark of required
quality before they will consider backing an author. This is generally a good
thing for readers seeking artistic merit in their reading matter, though
subjectivity of publishing’s selectivity of course comes into play. Traditional
publishing is not something worth obsessing about as a writer, because most
writers keep getting better and better even after they get published, which
means that whether or not you get published, no one can come to you and say
‘Okay, you’ve reached maximum quality: just give us this X amount of times and
you’re good to go.’ This is neither an attraction of creating nor appreciating
art. And again, there are levels of quality indies never knew they could
achieve because they were unaware those levels existed, but these levels will
reveal themselves if indies keep working and believing better quality is
achievable.

Published or
un-, no writer gets to coast for too long if they care about their craft. Every
writer that’s still alive and still writing is still learning. Unfortunately,
new indie authors tend to learn a lot more “in public” than published authors,
but any writer can observe this “no absolute quality benchmark” principle by
watching themselves improve irrespective of praise or attention. Too much praise
too soon is gratifying but sedative: if you could get away with 100% praise on
50% of your potential, why would you bother improving? If today was the first
day you put your hands on a piano, there’s no way you could become a world-renowned
concert pianist for many years. Some take less time than others perhaps, but
the real question is what would be the point in doing anything if just anyone
could do it straight away? Now, whether or not we need more art or new artists
is a question that shouldn’t bother anyone, because new great artists have a
way of proving their art is necessary by blowing you away with what they
produce after making art compulsively for years and years without anyone’s
permission or apparent need for them to do so.

I’ve recently
been reading Lionel Shriver’s novels, and from We Need to Talk About Kevin onwards,
her run is close to flawless. It took until she was 48 for anyone to really pay
attention to her. Imagine the kind of tenacity versus self-doubt back-and-forth
that has to go on for you to muddle through two
decades of obscurity? Not only that but I think they were due: she
published her first book at age 30 and I would argue there wasn’t great reason
to pay attention to her until two decades later. Only by Double Fault and A
Perfectly Good Family, Shriver’s sixth and seventh novels written over a decade
into her career, did I start to feel like I got my money’s worth. Only by Kevin,
book eight, released six years after book seven, did I feel like recommending a
novel of hers to anyone else. And even so, there’s a bum note or two in her
latest stuff! But I can’t get enough of Shriver’s writing now, whereas it was
just “not bad” before 2003.

It took Joseph
Heller until he was 50 to release Something Happened, only his second novel but
undoubtedly a work of genius and way better than Catch-22, I think. Marina
Abramovic has gained major mainstream fame only in recent years and she’s in
her late 60s. Damien Hirst (50) and Jeff Koons (60) both garnered early praise,
but I went to see their works in a modern art gallery in Oslo recently and the accumulation
of all their latest stuff is incredible, and it took me until this point in
their careers to “get it.” Comedian Stewart Lee had to take some time off from
stand-up comedy, after performing for 14 years, because his reviews were so
bad: after returning to the form, and now in his late 40s, Lee’s genius is
clear.

You can surely
supplant the above with your own examples. Making good art is a long game, and
as is said of many an overnight success, a closer look will reveal ages of hard
work.

Marina Abramovic
said that to be a young, famous artist is the killer. Obscurity is a total gift.
I only release stories that some trusted people deem decent, and there are
things that I and other indies are capable of that no one can yet say for sure.
Some find the preservation of younger mindsets across the course of a career of
great value. Some would say that people at different ages don’t know more or
less about the world than each other; they just know different things. I’m not
quite as generous, but something like that is true, so there really is value to
all the writing across a writer’s career- especially for the writer. And,
whether or not I enjoyed each of Shriver’s novels, for example, is irrespective
of how much I enjoyed charting her skill accumulation.

Indie
readers: We are lucky that we live in an age when an
author can be rejected by the publishing industry and still get their books
read. If we don’t read indies\ writers at all, what incentive do they have to
continue into territory that no one could have predicted in order to write our
favourite books that we didn’t know needed to exist? Without feedback from
readers, these books may never come. And there’s little that people dislike
nowadays more than missing out on something without even knowing what it is. As
an “indie reader”, you can be a patron and a supporter of the arts at minimal
cost to maximise the quality of artistic material injected into the culture. But
if you praise an indie author too much too soon, why would they get better? You
have a great responsibility, in all senses of “great”!

Indie
writers: If your book is getting amazing ratings,
how nice: ignore them. If people are slaughtering your books, that must be fun
for them, so you didn’t do that bad a
job, right? Once something is released, rest, digest, then look forwards.
Always be looking forwards. As Hugh Howey pointed out: your product is words,
so it’s not like your business grinds to a halt when you run out of product.
You can always keep going. Praise or no praise, if you are alive, you can and
will improve. As Will Self put it, “[A] creative life cannot be sustained by
approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you
go on.” And he got pretty damn good after the first ten years of writing
fiction.

Joy

Professional
editing can be a difficult thing for an indie to promise if they are pursuing
their dreams on a limited budget. I used to think that suspension of disbelief
was a terrifyingly fragile thing to conjure, but the truth is that we humans
are dying to see our own devices in everything. That makes it easy to enjoy a
story with spelling mistakes, weird grammar, nonsensical turns or clichés- not even
to say that I’ve even encountered that many of any of these anyway. Not only
that, but there are bonus joys that come with reading self-published content
that may well trump those of reading non-indie stuff.

The average
indie author, for example, is dying for an interview. Ever since he or she
wrote the first line of whatever book they’ve written, they were accepting
awards for it in their head. In most instances, turns out no one even wanted to
publish it. But encouragement is within reach for them and it comes from you.
And with what other authors that you love can you chat about their work? In whose
success can you in part stake claim? Most books have one guy or gal’s name on
the front, which makes us forget that they didn’t get there on their own.

As much as any
writer loves to say they told you everything they needed to tell you in the
book, I don’t know any of them that are that good. Noseying into their lives
always reveals insights and experiences. Nosey away at most self-published authors
whenever, wherever! You have an exclusive dialogue with the writer whenever you
want, and if you have experiences to share based on what you read in that
indie’s books, share them. You can guarantee the writer is interested because
they spent months writing about whatever topic it is. The book becomes a
dialogue-opener, and that’s often the point. In this case the reader is not just
reviewing a book, they are joining a community.

I reckon I have
about ten fans-slash-new-best-friends. And the great thing is that since
there’s only that many, I have enough time to interact with all of them and
chat endlessly about the ideas my stories sparked off. It’s lovely then that I
have far from achieved the critical mass of fame at which point a fan base outweighs
its object’s free time, which alongside the merits of success, must surely
build guilt and excess busyness. Most things in life have positive or negative
counterparts (this aphorism is its own counterpart, in that it is both “huh”-inspiring
but a bit too vague for any practical use.)

There are some
books that are so unanimously loved that I’m incapable of creating an opinion
or personal reflection. Or worse yet, before I’ve opened the thing, I want to
tear it to shreds. This is a common phenomenon, but maybe it is part of a
worldwide organic regulation system that limits fan-base sizes! It’s hard not
to feel millions of eyes reading the same book with me, and am I really so unadventurous/
important that I needed loads of people to tell me a book was great before I
picked it up? In many cases, such a following is far from an indication of
quality!

There is not
only the joy of reading a story but the “utilitarian outcome” of searching for
and finding quality material. This outcome is diminished when the material is
spoon-fed to you through bestseller lists and those “Top 100 Novels” things
packed with books you put off reading because seeing their names so often has
caused them to lose all meaning entirely. Self-published material offers a new
method of reading broadly.

When we consider
these unique ancillary joys and their contribution to the experience of a
self-published book, beyond the joy of reading the book itself, they may well
trump the experience that a bestseller/auteur’s work can offer. They were
again:

- The ability to stake claim in
part in what later success and improvement indie authors inevitably find as a
result of your involvement in their career

- The ability to interact with indie
authors and gain a deep insight into their work, an opportunity unique to authors
with small fan-bases

- The freedom to form an opinion
of an indie author’s work, irrespective of excessive praise/critique noise

- The utilitarian joys of finding
an indie author whose work you like, the best of which can undoubtedly compete
with bestsellers and auteurs

- General chat and hanging out
with a community of new cool friends you hadn’t yet met.

The last one is especially
true if you share my opinion that alive things are more important than the art
we discharge and our face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) impact eclipses anything
we could create. A book might change your life; so might a cat’s hug. Hanging
out and chatting and interacting with the world is pretty damn important, and encouraging
an indie author is one of the most valuable things you can do as a reader.

Generally,
though not always, it takes a bigger number of works into a self-published
writer’s oeuvre before they get up to speed in terms of style and original
voice. By all means take part in getting them there in an intimate and
connected way, such that the gift of their art is a thing you helped to create.

I Don’t Know 5: I CAN SPEAK!TM

This George Saunders story takes the form
of a letter written by an employee of the company KidLuv to a customer who has
returned a product known as the “I CAN SPEAK!TM”, a device which is strapped
onto a baby’s face and makes the baby appear that it is talking. The product cannot
read the baby’s mind: it simply says a number of stock phrases, or those
programmed by the parents, depending on the
chosen product’s sophistication.

The letter is filled with creep from the
first paragraph: ”I thought I would take some of my personal time (I am on
lunch) and try to address the questions you raised in your letter, which is
here in front of me on my (cluttered!) desk”, that only gets creepier “We would
like to come to your house on Lester Street and make a personalized plaster
cast of [your baby’s] real, actual face!”

The KidLuv employee writing the letter goes
on to proselytise for the company, detailing the many merits of the I CAN
SPEAK!TM range of products, creeping even further as he talks about the use of
the device on his own son: “It makes you love him more. Because suddenly he is
articulate…we have several times seen a sort of softening in the eyes of our
resolute childless friends, as if they, too, would suddenly like to have a
baby.” What is wrong with this guy, this corporate fetishising drone loser? It
soon becomes apparent: “last weekend my supervisor, Mr Ted Arnes, stopped by (a
super guy, he has really given me support, please let him know if you’ve found
this letter at all helpful) and boy did we all crack up laughing when [my son]
began rubbing his face very rapidly across the carpet in order to make his
ICS2100 shout, “FRICTION IS A COMMON AND USEFUL SOURCE OF HEAT!””

“On a personal note, I did not have the
greatest of pasts when I came here, having been in a few scrapes and even rehab
situations, but now, wow, the commissions roll in, and I have made a nice life
for me and [my family]… if you decline my upgrade offer and persist in your
desire to return your ICA1900, my commission must be refunded, by me, to Mr
Arnes… I don’t quite know what I’m doing wrong.”

It would be fantastically easy to indict
the person writing the letter and leave it at that: if he was a good guy, would
he work for this creepy corporation? Saunders has the intelligence and empathy
to demonstrate that “Corporate America” is a thing once created by humans that
now apparently roams around on its own. This is demonstrated in further stories
in the collection In Persuasion Nation, in which this story appears, most
memorably for me in the title story where a breast filled with Red Bull invades
a house and tries to nurse a baby.

Saunders has an essay collection called The
Braindead Megaphone, his name for the omnipotent voice of the media, defined as
“the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from
people we don’t know via high-tech sources”: it exists as a technically alive
separate entity, which is harmful, but has no easily definable consciousness at
its helm. Similarly, Corporate America pushes people apart and leaves them
dumbfounded as to how exactly it got to this or what to do about it. Behind the
corporate mask are a whole bunch of people trying to keep their kids fed: the
mask itself is alive and out of control. Quoting from The Braindead Megaphone: “How
does such a harmful product emanate from such talented people? I’d imagine it
has to do with the will to survive… each deferring his or her “real” work until
such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hiills,
or get a job that lets them honor their hearts.” Doesn’t that seem to reflect
Chekhov’s observations in “Gooseberries”? “A young friend who writes content
for the news page of an online media giant, emails me:… If anyone wonders why
Americans aren’t informed with real news it’s because of sell-out corporate
goons like me who will do anything to never deliver a pizza again.”

Saunders doesn’t claim to know what to do
about the situation, and from his non-fiction work, it’s clear he knows that awareness
of issues doesn’t automatically lead to the resolution of them: he merely aims
to reflect those issues, as apparently dumbfounded as anyone else as to how
America arrived where it is today.

Bonus
Last I Don’t Know! Synecdoche, New York

There’s no such thing as talking about this
film too much although if there was I have. All the analysis is done for me,
starting here. 

I don’t know about you, but I feel
positively healed, understood, reassured and yet disturbed by these examples. I
have re-entered life’s unknowable flux with just enough human understanding and
black humour to get me through. I wonder if with enough time, patience and
mind-boggling, you will be the next to join these greats?

I Don’t Know 4: Eyes Wide Shut

I’ve done my best to make the below
narrative/ observations make sense if you haven’t seen the film, but I doubt
they are all that interesting to read unless you have seen it. It’s not the way
I would have liked to receive its awesome messages about life (2h45min runtime,
prostitutes and Nicole Kidman? What??) but it is effective nonetheless :D

Eyes Wide Shut is a film about fantasy and
reality and actions and consequences and life and death and lust and money.
With symbols of games and toys and red and blue- also some Illuminati bullshit.

-         
Dr. Bill Harford goes to a
party where a patient of his named Victor calls him up to a room, where a
prostitute has OD’d. Bill brings this girl back to life.

-         
The inciting incident of the
story takes place when Bill’s wife Alice confesses to him a sexual desire of
hers that she had for another man, and did not act upon. Thereafter Bill
considers her fantasy in blue light, indicating not a shred of lust in it for
him. As a result of this confession of inaction, Bill heads off on a sexual
Odyssey that evening. To what extent is Alice’s fantasy just a fantasy? It created
Bill’s reality, the evening that follows. To what extent is Bill’s reality his
reality?

-         
Bill goes to a prostitute’s
flat. He is about to have sex with her, but by chance Alice calls him, and Bill
decides not to go through with it. In a later scene, we learn that this
prostitute had HIV. Why doesn’t Bill have HIV? Because Alice called him before
he could complete the act with the prostitute- though it’s not even a guarantee
he would catch it if he had gone through with the act anyway, but that will
never be known. It is not Bill’s lack of desire but Alice’s chance interruption
that stops him. Bill does not sleep with anyone on his Odyssey in fact: each
opportunity is interrupted. In this case, do we applaud him for stopping after
the interruption, the prostitute for making him think of his wife when she
inquires about the call, his wife for interrupting the act? Does the prostitute
deserve HIV more than Bill does? She does what she does for money- is this more
or less innocuous than what her clients do?

-         
Bill meets up with a friend of
his. He learns that this guy is to play the piano blindfolded at a classy orgy party,
run by some Illuminati-esque society who are pretty hostile to outsiders, ie Bill,
who goes to the party later that evening. The society catches Bill and is about
to do something obliquely bad to him, when a masked girl says she will
sacrifice herself for him, and is taken away.

-         
After the party, Bill goes to
the hotel where the party’s piano player is staying. Alan Cumming’s character,
the receptionist, is believable when he says that the piano player has left,
and nothing bad happened to him. When pushed by Bill, Alan gives some account
of “big guys” being in the hotel room with him the night before, and
of a secret envelope. Does he say this because he is flirting with Bill,
creating a miniature fantasy to gauge if Bill might go for him? There is a
lingering shot where we see Alan considering Bill a little after Bill has left
the hotel- it’s all deliberate… we cannot be sure that anything bad did
happen to the piano player after all- nor can we be sure that it didn’t. Bill
is pushed in the street afterwards and called a “faggot”, likely because of his
accidental involvement in Alan’s fantasy, which enters reality.

-         
Later, Bill meets Victor, the
patient of his from earlier who claims to have been at the party (everyone’s in
masks, so who knows?) Victor says that when the girl said she would sacrifice herself
for Bill, it was just an act to scare him away. But the prostitute that Victor
was with, whom Bill met at a previous party, OD’d and died that same night. Victor
reassures him that this is merely a coincidence, and also says that nothing bad
happened to the piano player. We can’t be assured of either of these things.
What does it matter which happened? Are we even sure that the girl that died
really was the one from the party?

-         
What do we think of Victor?
Before he appeared a second time, I thought worse of him than Bill. That is to
say, Victor was a married man who saw prostitutes, and Bill was a
non-judgmental doctor. After Bill and Victor meet again, they are about the same.
Victor went through with his affair, the girl nearly died, Bill brought her
back to life. Later, this same prostitute (we think) sacrifices herself for Bill
and “dies” (we think) even although Bill didn’t go through with any
of his fantasy. Then, who is worse? At first we judge Victor, and perhaps the
prostitute. In the end we judge Bill, and laud Victor and the prostitute for
the sacrifices they make to preserve Bill’s inherent “goodness”- though the
fantasy of an affair and the reality of it are treated equally. Victor and the
prostitute seem to perceive that Bill should be spared from the games they
play, when actually Bill plays the same games. Victor might be lying about the
whole thing, or maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. Since everyone wore
masks, we don’t know if Victor was at the party. We don’t know if the
prostitute was either. One thing is for sure: both men are out of their depth
when it comes to sexual fantasies that they want to make a reality.

-         
During the Bill-Victor scene
where they discuss the orgy, Victor mucks about with the balls on the red (no
accident) pool table, and Bill says he doesn’t feel like playing. But are we
fit to judge anyone in this film at all, based on what they do, what they don’t
do, what they fantasise about, what they don’t fantasise about? There’s no way
they can predict the consequences of their actions OR fantasies one way or
another, regardless of the intent of them, or their perceived badness or
goodness. But, maybe we see that the acts of sacrifice, the acts of forgiveness
are each and every time more noble. Each time thought turns to action converts
to consequence, we have no idea of the outcome of any of it, or what would
happen if we stop it at any step.

-         
At one point in the film Bill
wakes up Alice because she is laughing. When Bill sees his mask from the orgy
on the pillow beside Alice, he wakes her up because he is crying. Alice
confessed to him her fantasy, out of spite, and it started Bill’s weird sexual
saga. Bill confesses about the prostitute and the orgy to Alice- out of guilt?
Fear? Obligation?- and it ends all the problems. Alice confesses freely and
with conviction; Bill confesses only because he sees his mask from the orgy,
placed on the bed, perhaps because he is afraid and not because he thinks it’s
the right thing to do. Does he think that the confession will cure things? It
has no effect on whether or not the bad guys will stop chasing him. Does he
confess because he thinks the bad guys placed the mask there, or because she
found the mask? We don’t know that it was left at the party or not! Which
option was it, and does one of these make his confession better?

Things I did not figure out:

- What role does money play in this film? Bill
racks up quite a bit of spent cash in his evening. The costume shop owner wants
to send some guys to jail for sleeping with his daughter, but in the morning he
has a monetary agreement with them, one he is so satisfied with that he is
willing to offer his daughter to Bill in future if he so desires.

- What role does death play in the film?
One woman’s dad is dead, and she kisses Bill and proclaims that she loves him.
Is this to say that inaction and hoping for tomorrow brings about stasis, but
the realisation once again that we are going to die brings about urgency and
change? Love is often portrayed as a distraction from death.

- Bill asks Alice to tell him what she
dreamed: it seemed to reflect his evening at the party. She was there only in
fantasy. What is the significance of her dreaming his evening: is it nothing
more than a reflection of their dualities: him, reality; her, fantasy?

This film I believe is of the opinion that
people might think they want their fantasies to be a reality, but that’s not
what they want at all. What they want is what they have. Alice doesn’t like
that she and Bill will be together "forever”, and we can see this
film as a complete cycle. We create a fantasy world, we try it out and expect a
different outcome in spite of our experience. We then learn again the true
nature of life and that it cannot match our fantasies, once again. The cycle in
the film begins with a sexual act between Bill and Alice. In the final scene, they
make amends in a toy shop, again not deliberate (on their part, not Kubrick’s),
because they are children to the true chaos of their acts. He is sure they
won’t repeat the cycle and she isn’t. Whether they will or won’t, it has no
bearing on what happened. How they even reached the truth to each other was
very much out of their hands. And whether or not they will “book-end” the story’s
cycle is not revealed before the film ends.

One thing we can say for sure about Eyes
Wide Shut (lol the title) is that it deliberately blends reality and fantasy
alike: neither is a separate divide. Mere intention can cause consequence and
action doesn’t necessarily incur consequence: in what proportions this occurs
or doesn’t occur, we don’t know. We are children playing games we don’t know
how to play when it comes to the universe’s indifference to us and how it plays
dice with our fate, giving us what we deserve and what we don’t deserve, or
nothing, at random. Kubrick is not didactic about anything: the film has no
moral high- or low-ground, just a plateau. He does not even suggest there is a
way out or a way to act- as if we could really control our fate with our
actions anyway.

I Don’t Know 3: Camus’ The Fall

Having read the fall thrice now (it’s tiny,
dense and confusing) I’m pretty confident to say that it is a novel that
discusses the silent hypocrisies on which society founds itself. The narrative
is delivered in the form of a long monologue from Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a
once-revered lawyer, fallen from grace. As a result of “the fall”, Clamence is
painfully aware of the hypocrisies of his former existence, and is filled with
stories and analogies to deconstruct them: they are wonderfully dark and never
without their share of humour, which makes the novel just as daring and
illuminating when read today.

On our deceptive appearances

“I once knew a manufacturer who had a
perfect wife, admired by all, and yet he deceived her. That man was literally
furious to be in the wrong, to be blocked from receiving, or granting himself,
a certificate of virtue. The more virtues his wife manifested, the more vexed
he became. Eventually, living in the wrong became unbearable to him. What do
you think he did then? He gave up deceiving her? Not at all. He killed her.
That is how I entered into relations with him.” Jean-Baptiste enters relations
with a man because the man killed his own wife out of frustration for his own
lack of virtuosity. J-B holds an unwavering admiration for those who decry
their own hypocrisies. J-B goes on to say “I had no chance of killing my wife,
being a bachelor.” He believes that only not having a wife guarantees you won’t
kill your wife, not any kind of self-restraint or good character: as explained
later, J-B believes that we live in a constant grey area of morality that we
can choose to navigate across whenever, but that we love to deny this. As a
result, he shows, on more than one occasion, admiration for even the basest
people whose appearance reflects their character. “You think he looks like a
killer? Rest assured that his actions conform to his looks.”

“You are in business, no doubt? In a way?
Excellent reply! Judicious too: in all things we are merely “in a way.” Now,
allow me to play the detective. You are my age in a way, with the sophisticated
eye of the man in his forties who has seen everything, in a way; you are well
dressed in a way, that is as people are in our country; and your hands are
smooth. Hence a bourgeois, in a way!” Everyone is only something “in a way.”
Civilisation is preserved with categories. Everyone is in fact a little of
everything, undefinable and uncategorisable, forever evolving.

“We are all exceptional cases. We all want
to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost,
even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself. You won’t delight
a man by complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or
generous. On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity.
Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his nature or
his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be extravagantly
grateful to you.” J-B believes that we hate to acknowledge the effort that goes
into moving us across the moral spectrum: we are too scared to think of its
existence, that we may lack virtuosity and have to go about remedying that. If
we appear to be good, we must be inherently good; if we appear to be bad, our
circumstances must simply be inescapably unfortunate.

On relationships

“I
used to put [women] in the refrigerator, so to speak.” [Digression] In the It’s
Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “The D.E.N.N.I.S System”, Dennis reveals
his system for picking up women that allows him to sleep with them and leave
them, yet pick them up again whenever he wants to. The actor has said that
Dennis is the embodiment of his own worst behaviour, attitudes and habits. [End
digression.] “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures”, says Jean-Baptiste.

“The moment I was loved and my partner
again forgotten, I shone, I was at the top of my form, I became likable. Be it
said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I became aware of
its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would
have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the
one hand, have definitively fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed
its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the
extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be
imagined otherwise. My sensibility was opposed to this, and my love of mankind.”
Only “the death of the person [we are] interested in” will cement in place the
constant flux of our interactions and re-evaluations of each other and what we
want- this can indeed become unbearable at times.

“I am well aware that one can’t get along
without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh
air… The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If
he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get
angry with someone who has no right to talk back… Somebody has to have the last
word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would
never be an end to it.” Oppression is a necessary tool to cut short constant
discourse and the flux of life’s ambiguity. Eventually we need to decide right
and wrong to move forward, even although it has been explained that this is not
really possible.

On life’s constant flux

J-B recounts an incident where he hears a
woman falling into the water, perhaps to her doom (perhaps mirroring the ambiguity
of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet? Did Ophelia try to drown herself, or did she just
fall?) “I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound—which,
despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—of a body
striking the water. I stopped short, but without turning around. Almost at once
I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it
suddenly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still,
seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir. I was trembling, I
believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an
irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too
late, too far …” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood
motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one… What?
That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t know. The next day, and the days
following, I didn’t read the papers.”

J-B doesn’t know what happened to the girl.
Other incidents mentioned in the novel allude to the notion that the
conclusions he tries to draw from his own past rest on incomplete information.
And, having informed no one about this incident, this besmirching of his
character is not available for others to judge him upon. But what if the woman
was okay? Or does it matter either way, given that he didn’t help? Did he
really have any obligation? Maybe she wanted to fall in… This one event, a
couple of confusing minutes one evening, demonstrates the incomplete
information we have to go off when it comes to our judgement of others, or
ourselves. There’s no possible way to follow up our impact on everyone we’ve
met, nor is there any way for anyone to reach a definite conclusion about the
impact we’ve had on them either- and even so, that impact evolves as we try to
draw conclusions!

“If
I had been able to commit suicide and then see [the] reaction [at the funeral],
why, then the game would have been worth the candle.” If we were able to
“cement in place” our relationships with others, to “finalise” our interactions
with others, and see the effect it had, and how they added it all up, it would
be worth it. But we cannot live and know the whole of our effect on the world
at the same time, ever! The absurdity of existence, the unknowability. “In
order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.”
Doubt is the order of our lives, flux and greyness, no true black and white,
even if this is the artifice that holds us in place. Only death will end the
absurd, but it’s not worth it either, because you’ll never hear your own final
judgement. People from your life will happily crawl back out the woodwork to come
to your funeral and apply labels to you that they came up with that are almost
guaranteed not to capture who you really are. While we are alive, and not
conceivably able to have the relief of everyone else around us dead (and thus
all our relationships set in stone), the jury is constantly out on all of us,
and so does our moral status fluctuate in unknowable ways.

Life
is all middle, all confusion, with too much information in the air for us to
make reasonable sense out of it: “a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores,
lost in the fog, there’s no saying where it begins or ends. So we are steaming
along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress
and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.”

Conclusion

In The Fall, Camus identifies and addresses
a number of false truths that we assume to be true, and skilfully negates them
using some wonderfully dark and daring stories and analogies. The consistent
dark humour doesn’t “soften the blow” of these truths so much as affirm life in
spite of them. Camus rallies for us to live honestly- right? Is that possible?
Or do we live in a world so rife with hypocrisy and does civilisation need lies
to survive? Uh…