Fixing Fiction
All I've ever wanted to do is write.
Right now, I'm in the position of sitting with a 450-page manuscript in need of some editing, but I'm not editing it.
Let me clarify: on my Kindle, I've already gone through the book and marked it up. All I have to do now is make those changes and, for all intents and purposes, I am done. I can send it (again) to agents or post it on my website for free--or shit, why not both? It's my novel to do what I want with.
But still, something's missing. Part of me doesn't fix the book, because ... I'm tired? I secretly don't want to let go of it? I like sabotaging myself or wasting my own time?
Probably none of these. I think, actually using my brain right now instead of rattling off probable-sounding answers, that I was just plain ignorant. Not ignorant of anything mechanical or physical, although I'm no whiz at electronics by any stretch of the prefrontal cortex; no, more like ignorant of how to achieve shit in general, how to funnel my energy and whatnot into a halfway coherent path to a goal.
I believe I couldn't have published a book yet because I was pretty dumb. This is not to bash myself, because Christ knows I've already done plenty of that in my life, and my aim is never to do that again, but only to be frank. There's plenty of stuff I don't know, and getting published is part of that big, nebulous mass. So this right here is part of my effort to lift that "fog of war."
I mean, it's a weird process: you write a book over a few weeks, or a few months, or bunch of agonizing years, and then you ship it off to publishers or agents and pray for a response. You try to "make connections," "refine your pitch," and generally edge your way in to some local version of the literary world, even if it's a book club in Coshocton, Ohio.
Then you get rejected. Like 1000 times. Then you lose the energy to send things out, and you mill around in your apartment, drinking coffee and fretting over the poor state of your beard (and your finances), thinking ominously of your limited time on this rock and of all the more "useful" things you could be doing right then, like mowing the lawn--but you live in an apartment, sweet! You don't have to mow the lawn. But you have to make money, and sending out manuscripts to bastions of literature do not create dough.
So you get a job. Or you don't, you mooch off your girlfriend and your parents, hoping against hope that someone will swoop in from the Literary Echelon and rescue you, promise you millions, and smile with creepily white teeth as they brandish your freshly printed hardcover NOVEL.
Then your fantasy dies and you scratch at a weird stain on your leg, wondering if you can avoid your feelings of worthlessness by watching a lot of Netflix and eating chicken lo mein. (Sometimes it works; mostly you just feel you've wasted more time and money.)
Be a hustler, you say. Go out and hustle! How do you hustle? Where's your work ethic? you ask yourself. Maybe you should've mowed more people's lawns when you were younger. Maybe you should've committed to a more standard, meat-of-the-bell-curve lifestyle, since you're nothing special. Face it: you're not a maverick, you're not original: pretty much no one is (maybe Nikola Tesla).
And the weird thing is, you have a self-published book out there, on the wild rivers of Amazon.com, but of course no one's buying it. I mean, your amazing family and friends did, and they will forever occupy a shrine of gratitude in your heart, but you can't exactly expect them to support your ass until retirement, can you? So you let that book sit there, collecting virtual lint.
Focus on your manuscript, the one you wanted to print "traditionally." Except the one agent who gave it a full read-through politely declined (she was great, though), and the rest of the agents give you boilerplate bye-bye notices. Then you start doing oddjobs and helping other people with their books. A few start paying you, which is cool. It's not a lot, but it definitely helps. It makes you feel useful, at least.
And all the time your novel chills with a wry smirk on its paper-face, asking you without really demanding, "So ... when are you getting to me, motherfucker?"
You revise the book, then revise it again. You show it to some folks, who critique it both well and poorly, and taking their criticisms to heart, you make some good changes. You're grateful, again! Maybe it's ready now. But it's not ready: shit.
Months pass. One day at a coffeeshop (it's Starbucks, you're bad at supporting your local businesses, which is one of a million tasks on the to-do list you don't really consult) you realize you're not, like, restricted by time and space in fiction, so you can tell your story out of order! You're fucking elated. You run home and jumble up all the scenes in your book and sigh with a savage, elemental satisfaction, as if you've solved the key to our slowly-decelerating universe. (At least the acceleration of the acceleration is decreasing?)
Obviously, panic sets in. You've just fucked your book up completely! Now it makes no sense: it's garbage. There's no narrative arc. People are walking to the store on one page, and the next they're trapped in a Hyundai van in a typhoon with a dangerous criminal in the passenger seat, ardently discussing US foreign policy. What have you done? you ask yourself, and you despair in that adult-child way that really looks like slumping on the couch with your laptop and listening to Dark Side of the Moon until you've cycled through getting sick of it 900 times and you have a totally new and amazing appreciation for it -- because it is a sick album.
But Pink Floyd's 1973 masterwork won't get your novel out the door! Not to mention cash in your bank account, which, now that you critically think about it, will a book ever really bring you an appreciable chunk of income? Most authors are teachers, or rich to start, or live in squalor somewhere in East Idaho, or marry someone with a real job.
Your girlfriend has a real job! But you ask her to marry you because of real things like love, not the pathetic desire to be a ramora. Ramora marriages aren't quite marriages -- they're parasitic phenomena. At least there's some money coming in, all the same. You have a bit from your editing of other people's stuff, and you have cool friends who buy you dinner, cool parents who pay for your car insurance and your cell phone bill and shit, even your groceries quite frequently, although you like to think you're slowly weaning yourself off, like Thai heroin.
You build good habits, like eating an egg every morning for breakfast, then walking with your fiancee -- what a word! -- and writing down plans in a little white notebook. You practice your "pitch," negotiate over prices with people called "clients," and develop a neurosis with your smartphone, since those people might call you at any time with a severe formatting crisis. (But they really don't; sometimes they call just to talk.)
You read a shit-ton. Well, not really. You try to read as much as you can, and you make it through a decent number of books, but it's only ever that: average. You're no super-brain polymath who devours In Search of Lost Time on a lunchbreak; every time you've tried to read Proust, you started thinking of porn or paninis (should I pronounce it the right way, without the "s"?; but then everyone in America will think I'm an asshole.). You do read Infinite Jest, which a certain cadre of white males seem to regard as a weird Ur-text without internalizing its actual message of authenticity, although that may be in part due to its main failing, which is complete fucking inaccessibility to the average human with responsibilities in life that include more than ample, unchecked reading time. (You still like it, but you're not in any cult for the thing, it's still paper, you're judging all of them too harshly, probably because you're more or less like them. Shit.)
So did you fix fiction? No. You didn't even fix your own: it's lying broken, or maybe realistically just bruised, at the bottom of your My Documents folder. And of course your hard drive crashes, but you luckily have backed that thang up (apologies). You stare at your words and feel: revulsion, disgust, hatred, self-loathing, love, admiration, awe, joy, sadness, despair, regret, apathy, and I guess finally acceptance that it's an imperfect collection of sentences that express a central feeling you had a while ago, and still kind of have. Vulnerability!
And you write a blogpost that itself might seem a waste of time, since you could right now be editing that book and pitching it to agents for consideration, refining your authentically humorous sign-off, but you won't or can't because also The Walking Dead is on soon and you want to find out if Glenn is dead (he isn't).
You are ready to eat your words if he is, too. But shit, they can't kill the guy yet!
Anyway ... you try to be a normal organism and you realize all that really means is respecting your own inner needs and wants, not mowing other motherfuckers' lawns, even if that could teach you a few nice lessons and whatnot. You help others by helping your own damn self, and not in some stereotype millennial way of expecting the world to cater to your wishes (which you have already tried, although most of your friends never did that, so you don't get why baby boomers, who are no fucking angels themselves, try to shit all over your generation -- they should just shit on you, because you can take it, because you can write a decently clever comeback like "At least I never directly propagated racism and homophobia on a cultural scale while feeding desperately into the military-industrial complex in an attempt to avoid dealing with my unhappy marriage!"), but in a respectful way that acknowledges, obviously, that you should treat yourself less like an object or a martyr or someone else's model of foolish humanity, and instead like a cool flesh-balloon who has undeniable worth and is capable of making judgments about how she wants to use her life.
And then you accept that most shit is beyond you, and you just are where you are, which is so apparent a phrase it hurts you right where your college degree is supposed to hang on the wall, but it doesn't hang there because it counts for nothing in this goddamn economy.
And you still haven't fixed fiction. But you did fix that whole jumbled-up-scene thing, which turned out to be a boon that really did liberate you from traditional narrative arcs, while also impressing upon you the importance of some kind of arc, which you have tried to incorporate into this version.
You have your first sentence ready for action: Real men don't shake their babies!, and your last one: Keep reading, sea lion, I'll be around for a long, prosperous time. Everything in between is a crap shoot, but you feel better about it. Confident, maybe, although confidence doesn't matter so much as love; and, stupid or not, millennial bullshit or not, you love your book. How could you not? You lived with it like a roommate. It kept you from doing stupid stuff like committing suicide (although you're never stupid for feeling that way -- 301-314-HELP if you feel like it, fuck people who say you're a malingerer) and running off with various illicit people and substances. It helped you, weirdly, get married -- although you're not at the wedding part yet, so don't jinx it, keep moving forward. (Love you, boo.)
I guess in a traditional narrative arc this is the time you'd be realizing you have to fix yourself before you fix your book, never the reverse. Life is always more vital than ink on pulpy trees; like that tubercular Frenchman Roland Barthes said about Proust, you make your life the work, not the work your life.
Cue denouement: go out and be different ... dipshit? That's rude; I always tried to be a peaceful dude. (Album forthcoming.)
And I guess you realize in a fit of (small) insight how to help one of your clients, who's relying on you, who you know you'll do your hardest to help, because, at the end of the day, you know you want to help. That's why the fuck you're writing. It ain't oncology, but it sure teaches problem-solving skills and critical thinking, no matter what arts-funding-slashers like to pretend. Some famous poet I forget called it "equipment for life."
People will always need fiction, at least some people, because we're all built on stories. Stories are like the Legos that we make cool spaceships out of (plus, of course, various polymers).
We need it because there's a gap between us and them, whoever the hell we define those pronouns as -- Palestine, Paris, Belmar Beach; plumbers or gay Catholic nuns. I mean, there's a goddamn gap in ourselves. That's why we make fiction in the first place, to figure that out a little bit. (Now might be the time for a "mind the gap" quip, but I'll refrain.)
If fiction is about "what it means to fucking be alive" (DFW ftw), then you fix it by thinking of yourself, how to take that little-gigantic space between your values and your actions and bring it closer to integration. Sounds hard and strange, right?
Don't worry, baby.
Right now, I'm in the position of sitting with a 450-page manuscript in need of some editing, but I'm not editing it.
Let me clarify: on my Kindle, I've already gone through the book and marked it up. All I have to do now is make those changes and, for all intents and purposes, I am done. I can send it (again) to agents or post it on my website for free--or shit, why not both? It's my novel to do what I want with.
But still, something's missing. Part of me doesn't fix the book, because ... I'm tired? I secretly don't want to let go of it? I like sabotaging myself or wasting my own time?
Probably none of these. I think, actually using my brain right now instead of rattling off probable-sounding answers, that I was just plain ignorant. Not ignorant of anything mechanical or physical, although I'm no whiz at electronics by any stretch of the prefrontal cortex; no, more like ignorant of how to achieve shit in general, how to funnel my energy and whatnot into a halfway coherent path to a goal.
I believe I couldn't have published a book yet because I was pretty dumb. This is not to bash myself, because Christ knows I've already done plenty of that in my life, and my aim is never to do that again, but only to be frank. There's plenty of stuff I don't know, and getting published is part of that big, nebulous mass. So this right here is part of my effort to lift that "fog of war."
I mean, it's a weird process: you write a book over a few weeks, or a few months, or bunch of agonizing years, and then you ship it off to publishers or agents and pray for a response. You try to "make connections," "refine your pitch," and generally edge your way in to some local version of the literary world, even if it's a book club in Coshocton, Ohio.
Then you get rejected. Like 1000 times. Then you lose the energy to send things out, and you mill around in your apartment, drinking coffee and fretting over the poor state of your beard (and your finances), thinking ominously of your limited time on this rock and of all the more "useful" things you could be doing right then, like mowing the lawn--but you live in an apartment, sweet! You don't have to mow the lawn. But you have to make money, and sending out manuscripts to bastions of literature do not create dough.
So you get a job. Or you don't, you mooch off your girlfriend and your parents, hoping against hope that someone will swoop in from the Literary Echelon and rescue you, promise you millions, and smile with creepily white teeth as they brandish your freshly printed hardcover NOVEL.
Then your fantasy dies and you scratch at a weird stain on your leg, wondering if you can avoid your feelings of worthlessness by watching a lot of Netflix and eating chicken lo mein. (Sometimes it works; mostly you just feel you've wasted more time and money.)
Be a hustler, you say. Go out and hustle! How do you hustle? Where's your work ethic? you ask yourself. Maybe you should've mowed more people's lawns when you were younger. Maybe you should've committed to a more standard, meat-of-the-bell-curve lifestyle, since you're nothing special. Face it: you're not a maverick, you're not original: pretty much no one is (maybe Nikola Tesla).
And the weird thing is, you have a self-published book out there, on the wild rivers of Amazon.com, but of course no one's buying it. I mean, your amazing family and friends did, and they will forever occupy a shrine of gratitude in your heart, but you can't exactly expect them to support your ass until retirement, can you? So you let that book sit there, collecting virtual lint.
Focus on your manuscript, the one you wanted to print "traditionally." Except the one agent who gave it a full read-through politely declined (she was great, though), and the rest of the agents give you boilerplate bye-bye notices. Then you start doing oddjobs and helping other people with their books. A few start paying you, which is cool. It's not a lot, but it definitely helps. It makes you feel useful, at least.
And all the time your novel chills with a wry smirk on its paper-face, asking you without really demanding, "So ... when are you getting to me, motherfucker?"
You revise the book, then revise it again. You show it to some folks, who critique it both well and poorly, and taking their criticisms to heart, you make some good changes. You're grateful, again! Maybe it's ready now. But it's not ready: shit.
Months pass. One day at a coffeeshop (it's Starbucks, you're bad at supporting your local businesses, which is one of a million tasks on the to-do list you don't really consult) you realize you're not, like, restricted by time and space in fiction, so you can tell your story out of order! You're fucking elated. You run home and jumble up all the scenes in your book and sigh with a savage, elemental satisfaction, as if you've solved the key to our slowly-decelerating universe. (At least the acceleration of the acceleration is decreasing?)
Obviously, panic sets in. You've just fucked your book up completely! Now it makes no sense: it's garbage. There's no narrative arc. People are walking to the store on one page, and the next they're trapped in a Hyundai van in a typhoon with a dangerous criminal in the passenger seat, ardently discussing US foreign policy. What have you done? you ask yourself, and you despair in that adult-child way that really looks like slumping on the couch with your laptop and listening to Dark Side of the Moon until you've cycled through getting sick of it 900 times and you have a totally new and amazing appreciation for it -- because it is a sick album.
But Pink Floyd's 1973 masterwork won't get your novel out the door! Not to mention cash in your bank account, which, now that you critically think about it, will a book ever really bring you an appreciable chunk of income? Most authors are teachers, or rich to start, or live in squalor somewhere in East Idaho, or marry someone with a real job.
Your girlfriend has a real job! But you ask her to marry you because of real things like love, not the pathetic desire to be a ramora. Ramora marriages aren't quite marriages -- they're parasitic phenomena. At least there's some money coming in, all the same. You have a bit from your editing of other people's stuff, and you have cool friends who buy you dinner, cool parents who pay for your car insurance and your cell phone bill and shit, even your groceries quite frequently, although you like to think you're slowly weaning yourself off, like Thai heroin.
You build good habits, like eating an egg every morning for breakfast, then walking with your fiancee -- what a word! -- and writing down plans in a little white notebook. You practice your "pitch," negotiate over prices with people called "clients," and develop a neurosis with your smartphone, since those people might call you at any time with a severe formatting crisis. (But they really don't; sometimes they call just to talk.)
You read a shit-ton. Well, not really. You try to read as much as you can, and you make it through a decent number of books, but it's only ever that: average. You're no super-brain polymath who devours In Search of Lost Time on a lunchbreak; every time you've tried to read Proust, you started thinking of porn or paninis (should I pronounce it the right way, without the "s"?; but then everyone in America will think I'm an asshole.). You do read Infinite Jest, which a certain cadre of white males seem to regard as a weird Ur-text without internalizing its actual message of authenticity, although that may be in part due to its main failing, which is complete fucking inaccessibility to the average human with responsibilities in life that include more than ample, unchecked reading time. (You still like it, but you're not in any cult for the thing, it's still paper, you're judging all of them too harshly, probably because you're more or less like them. Shit.)
So did you fix fiction? No. You didn't even fix your own: it's lying broken, or maybe realistically just bruised, at the bottom of your My Documents folder. And of course your hard drive crashes, but you luckily have backed that thang up (apologies). You stare at your words and feel: revulsion, disgust, hatred, self-loathing, love, admiration, awe, joy, sadness, despair, regret, apathy, and I guess finally acceptance that it's an imperfect collection of sentences that express a central feeling you had a while ago, and still kind of have. Vulnerability!
And you write a blogpost that itself might seem a waste of time, since you could right now be editing that book and pitching it to agents for consideration, refining your authentically humorous sign-off, but you won't or can't because also The Walking Dead is on soon and you want to find out if Glenn is dead (he isn't).
You are ready to eat your words if he is, too. But shit, they can't kill the guy yet!
Anyway ... you try to be a normal organism and you realize all that really means is respecting your own inner needs and wants, not mowing other motherfuckers' lawns, even if that could teach you a few nice lessons and whatnot. You help others by helping your own damn self, and not in some stereotype millennial way of expecting the world to cater to your wishes (which you have already tried, although most of your friends never did that, so you don't get why baby boomers, who are no fucking angels themselves, try to shit all over your generation -- they should just shit on you, because you can take it, because you can write a decently clever comeback like "At least I never directly propagated racism and homophobia on a cultural scale while feeding desperately into the military-industrial complex in an attempt to avoid dealing with my unhappy marriage!"), but in a respectful way that acknowledges, obviously, that you should treat yourself less like an object or a martyr or someone else's model of foolish humanity, and instead like a cool flesh-balloon who has undeniable worth and is capable of making judgments about how she wants to use her life.
And then you accept that most shit is beyond you, and you just are where you are, which is so apparent a phrase it hurts you right where your college degree is supposed to hang on the wall, but it doesn't hang there because it counts for nothing in this goddamn economy.
And you still haven't fixed fiction. But you did fix that whole jumbled-up-scene thing, which turned out to be a boon that really did liberate you from traditional narrative arcs, while also impressing upon you the importance of some kind of arc, which you have tried to incorporate into this version.
You have your first sentence ready for action: Real men don't shake their babies!, and your last one: Keep reading, sea lion, I'll be around for a long, prosperous time. Everything in between is a crap shoot, but you feel better about it. Confident, maybe, although confidence doesn't matter so much as love; and, stupid or not, millennial bullshit or not, you love your book. How could you not? You lived with it like a roommate. It kept you from doing stupid stuff like committing suicide (although you're never stupid for feeling that way -- 301-314-HELP if you feel like it, fuck people who say you're a malingerer) and running off with various illicit people and substances. It helped you, weirdly, get married -- although you're not at the wedding part yet, so don't jinx it, keep moving forward. (Love you, boo.)
I guess in a traditional narrative arc this is the time you'd be realizing you have to fix yourself before you fix your book, never the reverse. Life is always more vital than ink on pulpy trees; like that tubercular Frenchman Roland Barthes said about Proust, you make your life the work, not the work your life.
Cue denouement: go out and be different ... dipshit? That's rude; I always tried to be a peaceful dude. (Album forthcoming.)
And I guess you realize in a fit of (small) insight how to help one of your clients, who's relying on you, who you know you'll do your hardest to help, because, at the end of the day, you know you want to help. That's why the fuck you're writing. It ain't oncology, but it sure teaches problem-solving skills and critical thinking, no matter what arts-funding-slashers like to pretend. Some famous poet I forget called it "equipment for life."
People will always need fiction, at least some people, because we're all built on stories. Stories are like the Legos that we make cool spaceships out of (plus, of course, various polymers).
We need it because there's a gap between us and them, whoever the hell we define those pronouns as -- Palestine, Paris, Belmar Beach; plumbers or gay Catholic nuns. I mean, there's a goddamn gap in ourselves. That's why we make fiction in the first place, to figure that out a little bit. (Now might be the time for a "mind the gap" quip, but I'll refrain.)
If fiction is about "what it means to fucking be alive" (DFW ftw), then you fix it by thinking of yourself, how to take that little-gigantic space between your values and your actions and bring it closer to integration. Sounds hard and strange, right?
Don't worry, baby.
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