"Flailin' for the Distance" - guest post by Paul Tremblay
Joel says: Paul Tremblay has long been one of my favorite writers. In 2009, his novel The Little Sleep was published by Henry Holt, followed in 2010 by No Sleep Till Wonderland, both of which feature a Boston PI with narcolepsy. Whenever I've come across one of his short stories, they've always been pitch perfect, spot-on, you name it - basically damn good. Plus, he's a Husker Du fan. Anyway, he was kind enough to contribute a guest blog for Beneath the Trap Door, so without further ado, here's Paul:
Flailin' for the Distance
This may sound a little telephone-operatorish, but stick with me. Nathan Ballingrud wrote a very thoughtful piece here in response to something Lucius Shepard posted on the social network. Lucius said, "I rarely write about stuff that’s going on in my head at the time–it seems to take around ten years for life to manifest in stories and my protagonists are often a decade younger than I. There are exceptions provoked by extreme emotion, but this is the general rule. What’s your lag time…or do you have one?”
From Nathan's response, which is generally about how he needs some distance from a highly charged emotional event before he can write about it: "In any case, it takes me a while to settle down. It takes me some time to find a place I can look back from and see an event completely. And I can’t write about it the way I need to until that happens. I wonder sometimes if I’m more like a teenager than a grown man. I appear calm on the outside, but inside it’s all wind and high seas."
I envy Nathan's foresight, and his ability to step back, to identify, and so eloquently express what part of writing process works for him. His protest to the contrary, his methodology strikes me as a very mature approach to writing.
I'm going to petulantly stick with the teen/adult metaphor because I want to, and because I've always imagined my writer-self as an angry teenager gnashing his teeth and flailing about, fighting for a seat at the adult table, and desperately attempting to understand what the hell is going on. Perhaps my angry-teen identification is nothing more than the vanity of the writer who forever pictures himself as young, vital, and (gulp) having something important to say. Whatever, right?
All my stories aren't created the same way, clearly, but more times than not my short stories in particular are born from immediacy, born from the heated moment. I jump half-blind into whatever emotion is moving me and then I use it to move/mold the story with the hope, I think, of understanding the emotions better, understanding myself better. Of course my emotional sky diving doesn't always work that way, and I do think so many of my short stories are ambiguous (shall we say?) precisely because I don't fully understand what it is I'm feeling, what I'm supposed to be feeling. But I think that's okay. As a horror writer, I hope that the reader shares in my angst, feels the dread of both immediacy and ambiguity: the dread of is-what's-happening-really-what-I-think-is-happening? and oh-crap-am-I-making-it-all-worse?
My most recently completed short story is very much about a new and therefore kinda scary family experience, and.... Okay, so I've written and erased at least twenty-five sentences already, trying to explain the emotions swirling around the academic testing of one of my kids who is experiencing some new focus/attention difficulty in school. It's a fairly mundane thing. I mean, millions of kids go through this and come out fine, right? Not to say it's not a struggle, that some kids don't come out fine, confidence and self-esteem totally shot, but...
All right, I'm stopping there. Because I've done enough rewriting of the above paragraph, which is still clunky as hell and doesn't even come close to expressing what I'm feeling, or more importantly, what I think my kid is feeling. So I wrote a story about it, and it was all much easier to write about in story form, even if I don't fully understand what *it* is.
Maybe it's as simple as this: When I'm writing about the now, I'm making a grab for that emotional distance--call it understanding or wisdom if you like--that only time grudgingly allows. I guess that imaginary-angry-teen me just isn't patient enough. He desperately wants that distance before he's too old or too dead to do anything with it.
www.paultremblay.net
www.thelittlesleep.com
Flailin' for the Distance
This may sound a little telephone-operatorish, but stick with me. Nathan Ballingrud wrote a very thoughtful piece here in response to something Lucius Shepard posted on the social network. Lucius said, "I rarely write about stuff that’s going on in my head at the time–it seems to take around ten years for life to manifest in stories and my protagonists are often a decade younger than I. There are exceptions provoked by extreme emotion, but this is the general rule. What’s your lag time…or do you have one?”
From Nathan's response, which is generally about how he needs some distance from a highly charged emotional event before he can write about it: "In any case, it takes me a while to settle down. It takes me some time to find a place I can look back from and see an event completely. And I can’t write about it the way I need to until that happens. I wonder sometimes if I’m more like a teenager than a grown man. I appear calm on the outside, but inside it’s all wind and high seas."
I envy Nathan's foresight, and his ability to step back, to identify, and so eloquently express what part of writing process works for him. His protest to the contrary, his methodology strikes me as a very mature approach to writing.
I'm going to petulantly stick with the teen/adult metaphor because I want to, and because I've always imagined my writer-self as an angry teenager gnashing his teeth and flailing about, fighting for a seat at the adult table, and desperately attempting to understand what the hell is going on. Perhaps my angry-teen identification is nothing more than the vanity of the writer who forever pictures himself as young, vital, and (gulp) having something important to say. Whatever, right?
All my stories aren't created the same way, clearly, but more times than not my short stories in particular are born from immediacy, born from the heated moment. I jump half-blind into whatever emotion is moving me and then I use it to move/mold the story with the hope, I think, of understanding the emotions better, understanding myself better. Of course my emotional sky diving doesn't always work that way, and I do think so many of my short stories are ambiguous (shall we say?) precisely because I don't fully understand what it is I'm feeling, what I'm supposed to be feeling. But I think that's okay. As a horror writer, I hope that the reader shares in my angst, feels the dread of both immediacy and ambiguity: the dread of is-what's-happening-really-what-I-think-is-happening? and oh-crap-am-I-making-it-all-worse?
My most recently completed short story is very much about a new and therefore kinda scary family experience, and.... Okay, so I've written and erased at least twenty-five sentences already, trying to explain the emotions swirling around the academic testing of one of my kids who is experiencing some new focus/attention difficulty in school. It's a fairly mundane thing. I mean, millions of kids go through this and come out fine, right? Not to say it's not a struggle, that some kids don't come out fine, confidence and self-esteem totally shot, but...
All right, I'm stopping there. Because I've done enough rewriting of the above paragraph, which is still clunky as hell and doesn't even come close to expressing what I'm feeling, or more importantly, what I think my kid is feeling. So I wrote a story about it, and it was all much easier to write about in story form, even if I don't fully understand what *it* is.
Maybe it's as simple as this: When I'm writing about the now, I'm making a grab for that emotional distance--call it understanding or wisdom if you like--that only time grudgingly allows. I guess that imaginary-angry-teen me just isn't patient enough. He desperately wants that distance before he's too old or too dead to do anything with it.
www.paultremblay.net
www.thelittlesleep.com
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