Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
I’m participating in the National Novel Writing Month challenge for this year, in which the goal is to write 50,000 words of a fictional novel between November 1 and November 30, 2007. The goal is quantity, not quality, something that is designed to smash down the perfectionist’s writer’s block. I’m giving it a shot for the first time in my life. I’ve never so much as written a fictional short story, so this will be a real challenge and growth experience.
Here’s a fragment from yesterday’s writing:
“Why did he have to give me a name like ‘Bingley?’†asked the boy over a dinner of chicken drumsticks, jasmine rice and green peppers an hour and a half later.
With a teenager in the house, Carl had learned the value of maintaining what he called “meal sets†at the ready for deployment at a moment’s notice. Not only could a kid in high school be occasionally too moody to come down for a scheduled dinner, but there were the second breakfasts, the midnight snacks, and the unannounced visitors who seemed to have a way of nudging a space open at the dinner table. Carl didn’t mind this challenge; on the contrary, he seemed to savor it as a test of his abilities as a parental surrogate not just for Bingley but for all the kids who found their way to his kitchen.
When he was growing up, Carl’s mother on occasion would tell him stories about his grandfather, who would bring all sorts of what she’d call “characters†home for dinner without so much as a phone call. Grandma would complain around the edges, but she always seemed to be able to pull a meal together out of the contents in the pantry, no matter how meager they were. Any complaints by Carl as a boy when he was denied a wanted toy were met by his mother’s story about the potato – one large russet potato split six ways to feed a family of four and two homeless guests.
Even now, the bare mention of the potato story would prompt Carl to roll his eyes. Nevertheless, the tale’s repetition had accomplished its intended purpose in setting a standard for Carl to meet in his domestic life as an adult. “Just in case,†Carl would mutter to himself at the grocery store when he encountered an unnecessary item that might prove useful in the future. A pork tenderloin that surely would fit in the basement freezer. A head of cabbage; now that would keep from wilting or rotting longer than most other fresh vegetables. Packets of ramen would do in a pinch, too, as long as there was some green onion, some leftover chicken to shred, and maybe an egg to scramble into it.
Carl didn’t stock his kitchen like this for the hobos. Really, Carl had no idea how he would even find people to help out like that. Maybe homeless travelers didn’t make themselves public like they used to; almost nobody hitchhiked any more or stayed in the parks past dawn. Maybe Carl’s grandfather’d just had the knack, or maybe he’d had an open face. Or maybe it was Carl who had an unusual deficit in that regard. Carl had joked more a few too many times to his friends that he wouldn’t know how to find recreational drugs if he’d even wanted to try them, or how to find a prostitute if he’d been feeling lonely and inclined. His friends would to pause a few uncomfortable seconds before bringing up another more wholesome subject.
No, Carl wouldn’t know how to find such people to bring home for dinner. The way it had worked instead was that the kids found Carl. He’d stocked his kitchen well-enough, and treated area kids to delicious snacks and meals at odd times of the day for long enough, that eventually one of those kids would get locked out of the house accidentally and just know where to go until mom came home with her extra key. From there it was a combination of word spreading from friend to friend and the acceleration of events. From a kid getting locked out accidentally, to a kid who’d gotten drunk and didn’t want to face the music at home just yet, to a kid needing refuge from fights at school, to a kid getting locked out on purpose, to a kid finding refuge from getting knocked around at home. Because Carl worked from home, his kitchen was pretty much always open, and he just wasn’t the kind of man to say no to someone with a need. With some of the kids, he’d never even get to know their name; they’d just come in on the trails of someone else and drift out before anybody noticed. Some of the kids would stick around a while longer.
If I can write this dreck, surely you can write something better. Go ahead, give it a shot.
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November 2nd, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Ah, I see you have risen to the challenge. Excellent. No, it doesn’t have your voice, more like a character study. Reminded me of a commune I lived in back in the 70’s with people floating in and out, but no, maybe more like the church homeless feed for the alkies, or maybe Ken Kesey will show up with the Merry Pranksters, or maybe setting up a situation for a nerdy pervert to work undetected. I can hear the Grateful Dead playing in the background, or will the point of view voice be more of an observer to hipness like “On the Road”.
Funny how the word “deploy” can creep into the language.
Now where’s that layabout, jclifford? Hasn’t he got the rugrats Nyquilled and tucked in yet, or whatever you do with them? You’d think he could post 200 words or so.
Now that you mention it, where’s Mrs. jclifford? I bet she writes when she can. And Mother Davis? Don’t tell me she’s ready for a rocking chair, isn’t she warming up the old keyboard? She does short real nice and pithy, but can she do long?
November 4th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Jim may have stopped writing, after only three days of unhappiness, but I’m not ready to stop trying to learn something from the experience.
Dreck. Dreck. Is that why Jim stopped writing? He writes political broadsides just fine, but an attempt at literature leaves him saying “dreck”?
He wanted to grow, he wanted to smash perfectionism, but now he’s at a standstill. Same place I was at on Nov. 3 last year.
Some writers can do a wide variety of stuff–look at Mark Twain with his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels, as well as the shorter “Letters from the Earth” series and the immortal “War Prayer”.
Then there’s someone like Kipling who could only do short stories. The “Tales from the Hills” I can’t put down. Kipling’s one attempt at a novel was bad although he did some jingoistic poetry he didn’t like himself,(Gunga Dinn, Road to Mandalay) but captured the public imagination. One of my favorites, Sara Paretsky, who writes the Chicago whodunits had some really awful short stories published, although her hard-bitten private detective, V.I. Warshawki continues to be a favorite. These writers are one-trick ponies, but the one trick they’ve got is pretty good.
November 4th, 2007 at 10:09 am
This could be the blind leading the blind (I bet Bob S-K would have some better insight) but I’ll do what I can with the fragment.
The opening sentence is alive. It takes place in the present and you’re not sure where it’s headed.
The rest is narrative. I had to read the rest twice, with concentration, to get the meaning out of it. A little like reading Pride and Prejudice, which I have never found worth completing. Still this is what the actors who gather on Charlie Rose late at night call “back story”. This does not end up in the finished production. But without it–and actors just love character study–the finished product would be flat and one-dimensional.
There seem to be some ghosts of themes in the background. The protagonist thinks prostitutes are for loneliness? Someone who doesn’t understand the difference between sex and friendship is branching out into immature relationships with younger people because he hasn’t got the social knowledge of his own age group? Is this someone with a fatal flaw or just a minor passing nerdiness? Or a caretaker mentality. Or maybe the theme is differences between generations. Grandfather picked up strays, the protagonist will do it too, but with differences. A novel needs a conflict, and there are some potentials here but I don’t see it yet. Whodunits are a lot more obvious–on the first page they find a dead body and take it from there.
Bob S-K’s excerpt that you can read online is fun because of the way he writes dialog with action–you can see his character developing leadership abilities in spite of himself even though that isn’t spelled out.
What about using flashbacks? Isn’t this a comparison of the ways family values are transmitted? The protagonist mother telling a story over the kitchen table and now it’s come full circle and he has to decide what to pass on?
Somehow I expected a more political theme, like something about a third party or about rabble rousers, like the groups that were considered for the Oct 5 march last year. Or something about a homosexual senator who hobnobs with religious goofusses. Or the political machinations of academia.
All right, that’s all the ruminations and insights I’ve got at the moment. I’m no closer now to trying to figure out why my own writing attempt got stuck. Maybe the neighborhood dollar store is open by now and I can get something to knock out my fever.
November 11th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Jim,
I wouldn’t listen to any of these ramblings. I think you are off to a great start. You have certainly captured my curiousity. Please continue writing. I would love to see where this story goes and how it will end.