Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
WORDMONKEY
Today’s challenge: write a piece of flash fiction that begins with a visitor at the door. A guest. Or a villain. Or something altogether stranger. Any genre will do. But someone is at the door.
Who? Why? For what purpose?
Length: 1000 words-ish
Due by: Friday, June 17th, noon EST.
Post at your online space, drop a comment here.
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
It’s a big day. I don’t have adequate words to express how big — but this country just told its daughters what other nations before it have said: you can go all the way to the top. You can be a nominee for president and soon, I believe, the president proper, because I’m with Hillary Clinton. She’s got my vote in the general, which admittedly may sound like faint praise given her opponent. Honestly, a lawn chair would have my vote. I’d vote for a bowling ball covered in dog shit and pubic hair before I vote for Trump. But even if the GOP had a more-human, less-lotion-soaked-Hitler-merkin on their side, I’d still be voting for Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a strong leader. I think she’s done a lot for this country and for the world through charity. I think she’s smart, savvy, a good speaker. I think she understands compromise and coalitions. I’m proud to have her as our candidate. She is easily one of the most qualified candidates we’ve ever had, given the number of roles she’s occupied. And she’s been vetted left and right, often by Republicans wanting to knock her back every time she blinks funny. Little did they know, they were just toughening up her chitinous exoskeleton. None of the scandals stuck. Their messaging failed to prevent her candidacy. She’s still here, and I’m with her, and I hope you are, too.
(If you wonder just what the fuck she’s done, well, I got a website for you.)
It’s funny, I remember in the 90s that HRC was accused of being too progressive — some liberal lawyer who wanted to ruin America with her BASICALLY COMMUNIST values. And now we’ve gone the other way with it, where we worry that she doesn’t pass the progressive purity test. And as a women, she faces criticism that men generally don’t or won’t get. Certainly there’s a vanity to politics, but she seems to catch more heat for whether she smiles or doesn’t smile, whether she’s too loud or not loud enough, whether she wears clothes appropriate enough (too dowdy, too matronly, too expensive, too mannish). The fact she persevered in both 2008 and now again eight years later is pretty amazing all by itself. She’s earned so far the lion’s share of the popular vote — 15.5 million people is no small scratch.
Also she did an episode of Broad City, which in my mind is good as gold.
GOLD, PEOPLE. PRECIOUS GOLD. Because seriously, Broad City.
I recognize she is not the perfect candidate, but the perfect is the enemy of the good — further, I’ve never met a perfect candidate. I like Sanders and I adore Obama, and at the end of the day, each are politicians, and each have stances or actions that I just don’t dig. You don’t get into this big game without some blood on your hands. (We all love FDR, and conveniently forget that he put Japanese-Americans in internment camps.)
Politics can’t be a game of polarities, because that’s how nothing gets done. It’s a game of elasticity and compromise. I think Sanders rocked up a helluva campaign — historic, really, both him as a candidate and with his top-notch grassroots campaigning. (And I hope now to see that campaign pivot to continue pushing that agenda across all the tickets, both in supporting Hillary and in pushing her to be a better candidate for the common man.)
At the start of today, I see a fair amount of joy and anger in equal measure this morning on THESE HERE INTERNETS, and I think that’s okay and understandable — primary season is tough and it divides us for a time and we back one candidate with our hearts and often enough with our wallets, so to see it go one way over another makes us worry. The anger’s normal, and nobody should shame you for it. The joy is normal, too, and likewise, you shouldn’t be made to feel bad for that kind of pride. With hearts on sleeves, I know that the primary season has left things a bit heated, but that’s okay. I think it’s also vital to remember that at the end of the day, we had two real candidates. Two candidates who could’ve run this country well and who each ran a really spectacular campaign based on actual values rather than discussing dick sizes and walls and being basically horrible to each other. That side is a urinal on fire. Our side, no matter how much we disagree on the minutiae of these two candidates, is the real deal.
My hope is that in the coming weeks we’ll see unity start to emerge, and bridges we set on fire will cool down and get some much-needed repairs, because coming up in the general election we have to defeat an ACTUAL SEPTIC SYSTEM who gained life and sentience upon being struck by lightning. We have a Cheeto-fingered, tanner-drinking, democracy-dismantling Hutt-slug to beat back in the general election. Further, we have a Congress to overturn, and we have to act like we can paint the road the blue from one coast to the other. If we want a progressive agenda in place, then we have to start building that infrastructure now — Sanders showed very clearly that this country hungers for a progressive, common man approach to politics, and to earn that out means we’re going to have to do more than elect just one person — we’re going to have to take it all the way down to every itty-bitty district, to every voter.
Be well. Find joy. Express anger. And soon, I hope, we unify.
I’m with her.
Comments off, because c’mon.
A fine human being (or a very savvy robot) emailed me to ask a really important — and head-bonkingly difficult — question.
This human-slash-robot said:
I’m good at idea part. I have lots of notes for several novels on characters, who they are, how they know each other, what they want, their backstories. On settings, where and when everything takes place. I’m also good at the “sit down and shit out words” part. I can knock out 10k words in a week if I’m really in a groove.
But what I’m bad at is the STORY part. I’m horrible at getting from “I know the basic setup” to “I have an outline for where this is going”. Lately, most of my abandoned projects are abandoned because I just don’t have an idea what these people do or what happens to them once I’ve created a situation. I write 4k or 10k words and realize, “I don’t have a real story here.” Any pointers you have along those lines are greatly appreciated. It’s the one thing I haven’t found so far in your book or on your blog: how do you create enough story-stuff to build a novel around? And if I can’t seem to do it, should I just give up on novels?
So, to clarify —
The ideas are easy. (And they are. Ideas are baubles — cheap, chintzy, shiny, and freely available.) The writing is easy in the sense that, okay, you can sit down and dig the word ditches in Unicorn Land till your fingers go black and rot at the knuckles.
But story.
Story.
That’s the hard part, this humanbot is right. Story is an unruly beast.
Plot? Plot is easy. Plot is simple. Plot is just: the order of operations and events within the story as revealed to the audience. It’s a sequence of happenings — ideally, those happenings are driven by characters rather than by a COLD AND UNFEELING UNIVERSE, and in a perfect world the plot is a road built by the wherewithal of those characters, but either way, the plot is just the program. They do this, they do that, this happens, this happens, then that happens, he does a thing, she does a thing, the end, go home.
But plot is not story.
Plot is the arrow, and story is the apple that it punctures. Story is all the stuff. All the fibrous material and intangible air surrounding the fiddly bits. The story is the whole beast. It’s the whole animal. And you have to use the whole animal.
But here, I’m saying a lot of words, and I’m not helping you understand story very much at all. And that’s because story is a hard thing to understand. Writers put words to paper, but storytellers take those words — or images, in the case of film and TV and comics — and spin that dross into candy floss. Writers make horses. Storytellers fucking make unicorns, man.
So, what is story?
At the simplest level, story is a mechanism of desire and denial, of conflict and escalation and complication before resolution. I, the character, have a problem. I seek to solve my problem, but between me and the solution wait an obstacle course of other problems and other people and those people have competing desires. And I, the character, navigate that Scylla and Charybdis to either answer my desire or fail to manifest my desire. I solve my problem or I jolly well fucking don’t. That’s the story. There will be some shape to it — a rise to a mountainous peak, a slithering heavenward curve, a jagged line of fanged peaks, a rollercoaster going left and right. (See an earlier post of mine about story shapes and narrative architecture.)
I said once (“In Which I Critique Your Story That I Haven’t Read“) that story can look like:
1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM
2. HEY LOOK A SOLUTION
3. THE END YAY
But, really, it probably ends up looking like:
1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM
2. I’M GONNA JUST GO AHEAD AND FIX THAT PROBLEM AND –
3. OH GOD I MADE IT WORSE
4. OH FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING IT WORSE TOO
5. WAIT I THINK I GOT THIS –
6A. SHIT SHIT SHIT
6B. FUCK FUCK FUCK
7. IT’S NOT JUST WORSE NOW BUT DIFFERENT
8. EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED
9. ALL IS LOST
10. WAIT, IS THAT A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?
11. IT IS BUT IT’S A VELOCIRAPTOR WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN ITS MOUTH
12. WAIT AN IDEA
13. I HAVE BEATEN THE VELOCIRAPTOR AND NOW I HAVE A FLASHLIGHT AND MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED IN PART BUT NOT TOO NEATLY BECAUSE TIDY, PAT ENDINGS MAKE STORY JESUS ANGRY, SO ANGRY THAT STORY JESUS GIVES EVERYONE MOUTH HERPES
Still, that’s a program. It’s not quite plot, but it’s plotty — because it suggests a series of events. Or, at the very least, it suggests a mechanism. And a mechanism is a cold, implacable motherfucker. Story, on the other hand, isn’t cold. Story is a warm whiskey burn.
On the one hand, any character-conflict-escalation-resolution narrative probably ends up being “a story.” A man catches a fish isn’t much of a story, because his problem isn’t a problem. His desire isn’t denied. (A fish catches a man — now, that’s a story.)
Story is a sum greater than the parts of the plot. It is more than the mechanism.
I’m still not helping, I know.
Story is all those things, but it connects to us. A story is interesting. A story lets us see ourselves in it — and it is in that way both a unique snowflake and a universal precept. Or, more to the point, the story is the unique delivery system by which we get to talk about universal concepts and problems. We can talk about a THING WE ALL UNDERSTAND by framing it around a narrative unique to the author — every character and setting and conflict is a potential lens through which we can look upon this universal problem. Story takes this lens and it helps us to see old problems in new ways. Stories make us feel and think. Stories have power. Stories move us, shape us, and do the same to the world. It does this in the way that a song can do it. It has rhythm, like a song — slow to fast, up and down and then up again. Pause, leap, wait, then run. Stories are not a manicured garden. They’re an unruly forest —
A tangle of thorns in which we find ourselves happily ensnared.
My father was a storyteller, and he used to tell stories about his day at work or this time he got into a knife fight or that other time he and my mother jumped a ravine on his snowmobile, and often enough, his stories had the feel of a joke or a magic trick. There was the sense of a turn in there, a pivot, a punchline. A snake twisting in the margins. A sudden turn left when you thought you were going right. And you waited for that. You weren’t just interested to see what was going to happen — because, obviously, he survived — you waited to see the complications. You wanted more than just what was tied to the end of the rope, you wanted the kinks and knots in the rope itself. You want an interesting journey, not just a desirable destination.
It’s why if you want to be more than just a writer, you need to look at good storytellers. Comedians are a good place to start: Tig Notaro, Aziz Ansari, George Carlin, Louis CK. Listen to songs that tell stories — not just pop songs, but songs with tales to tell. Watch documentaries: note that documentaries are a good example of taking the mechanism of plot (by which I mean, a sequence of events) and translating that in a bigger way, finding messages, finding a throughline that hangs it all together and allows the material to transcend just THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED. (Actually, that calls to mind a book which is not a documentary: The Things They Carried, which is as much about war as it is about story. In fact, I’d argue it’s more about story than it is about war.) Best of all, find those people in your life who are natural storytellers. That guy at work. Your cousin. Your grandmother. Get them to tell a story. Listen to how they do it. How do they frame it? How do they ease you into it? What’s the hook? Why is it interesting?
None of this answers the question, of course.
None of this really explains story.
To do that, I’d probably need a lot more room. But maybe it helps. And maybe it gets you thinking about some of this stuff, even though it fails to properly finish the job or give hard answers to the tough question of how to make story work.
As such, I figure this is a good place for an announcement:
I’ve got a book coming out next year with Writer’s Digest that will tackle exactly this. The book is called Damn Good Story and I’m not sure of a release date yet, but I suspect latter half of 2017. It tackles all this unruly stuff — and it will be less about providing concrete answers to the question of what makes a good story and will instead just attempt to crack open the geode that is your head so we can all get access to the shiny bits inside. And in the meantime, if you’d like to check out some of my other writing books, you can nab the Gonzo Writing Book Bundle (that’ll get you eight books for $20), or you can go grab The Kickass Writer, also from Writer’s Digest. So, coming soon: DAMN GOOD STORY. Until then, we’ll keep talking here at the blog, see what we can figure out together.
A quick homework assignment if you’re so inclined:
Drop into the comments and recommend what you consider a real good story (or who you consider a damn good storyteller) — bonus points for something that isn’t just a book or a movie. Songs. Documentaries. Comedy routines. Whatever.
BEHOLD THESE LITTLE LADYBOOGERS.
I’m warning you, too, I have some new spider macros.
And I’m gonna post them.
Not this week. But next week, mos def.
I KNOW. I know! I said I wouldn’t. But they’re so cool. And spiders, c’mon — spiders are helpful little beasts. All those times you went to the doctor and you’re like LOOK AT THIS SPIDER BITE, and the doctor reminds you that 90% of spider bites aren’t actually spider bites? Spiders are great. They eat bad bugs. They’re like possums in that way — we hate on possums (sorry, “opossum”) but they eat thousands of ticks a week. And ticks are little monsters.
Anyway! Cool spider photos incoming next week. I will give you enough white space at the fore of the post so you never have to scroll down and see them ever, ever, ever.
What else is going on?
In a couple weeks I’ll be at the Orlando Book Festival, giving a keynote, signing some books.
On 6/22, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop, hanging out with Paul Tremblay and talking about his (really fucking amazing) newest, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.
I may be at Let’s Play Books in July, too, to talk Star Wars.
I’ll be at SDCC in July.
Then in August, I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop for the launch of Invasive!
You can preorder the book, signed, from Doylestown Bookshop here. (And if you don’t know, pre-ordering helps the author and the publishing ecosystem in a whole host of ways. It conveys to the seller and publisher that the author is in demand. It helps the seller stock the book. It helps the author FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT WEEP OPENLY INTO HIS FROSTED FLAKES and stuff like that.)
I think that’s all, folks.
Maps are glorious things. With them we find treasure. We make our way across counties, states and countries. We use them to mark DANGER. Maps can be public, secret, or something interstitial. Maps can be magic or mundane.
Maps are cool.
So, you will write a piece of flash fiction that contains a map.
Not a literal, drawn map (though if you can do that, you’re extra-awesome). No, I mean, in the fiction itself, a map is a part of the story. That’s it. That’s the only stipulation besides the usuals:
Length: ~1000 words
Due by: Fri, June 10th, noon EST
Post at your online space. Give us a link in the comments. The end.
Steven Spohn is a writer and also the COO and outreach director at AbleGamers, a charitable organization dedicated to helping disabled people improve their lives through gaming. Steve wanted to write something about an upcoming film based on a novel, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and he asked if it would be a good fit here. And I think it’s important to have his voice heard with things like this. So, here’s Steven! (Oh, and don’t forget to read another post of his here — “Your Last Good Day.”)
* * *
An Open Letter to Jojo Moyes and Aspiring Writers —
As a child, I never really got to “see myself” on-screen in the same way that other children did in Superman, Batman or Xena.
Sure. I could watch Keanu Reeves as Neo, indulge the fantasy, dive into the escapism and picture myself as The Chosen One. After all, no one can fly or dodge bullets like Mr. Anderson, so the fact that I couldn’t walk like he does wasn’t exactly a stretch of my imagination.
Historically, Hollywood releases a movie with a profoundly disabled character once every few years. And although the frequency has been increasing as disability becomes more accepted in the mainstream, main characters with severe disabilities are extremely rare and (in my experience) never seen in romances.
In fact, the lack of main characters in books or TV with severe physical disabilities confining them to a wheelchair are so rare that if I had a quarter for every time someone asked me if my favorite fictional character was Professor Charles Xavier, I could literally buy you a Ferrari.
So, you can probably imagine when I first saw the trailer for Me Before You, a movie depicting a quadriplegic man romancing a young female caretaker and sharing some of the same thoughts most of us with severe disabilities have, I would’ve been excited. “Finally! A romance about a quadriplegic man and an able-bodied woman.”
(Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh993__rOxA)
**Spoiler warning below for the book and movie Me Before You**
And I was, until I read the book.
The female lead Louisa is hired to take care of Will, which unbeknownst to her is a type of suicide watch. When she finds out he plans to go to Dignitas — a place in Switzerland that helps people commit assisted suicide, she’s distraught. Eventually Lou comes around and decides she will do her best to change his mind during the remainder of the six-month window Will promised his parents he would use to consider his choice. In the end, despite falling in love with each other and Louisa begging Will not to go, he decides to stick to his decision and end his life.
“I don’t want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don’t want you to miss out on all the things someone else could give you. And, selfishly, I don’t want you to look at me one day and feel even the tiniest bit of regret or pity that — … You have no idea how this would play out. You have no idea how you’re going to feel even six months from now. And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked, to watch you wandering around the annex in your crazy dresses and not… not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark, if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now. And I… I can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just… accepts.” (pp. 325-326)
Men and women who are severely disabled fight demons that speak the words above almost every day. There is not a man or woman who is quadriplegic or near the quadriplegic stage of a progressive disease who has not worried about being a burden to their loved ones or if being in a relationship is fair. Those questions are in the back of our minds every moment of every day.
‘Me Before You’ was an opportunity to create a commercially successful, Nicholas-Sparks-level, true genre-defining romantic movie starring someone who is severely physically handicapped conquering his demons, winning the girl and riding off into the sunset like we see in so many other Hollywood romances.
If those types of books and movies were more common, this movie wouldn’t even be controversial because it would just be one movie of dozens. Unfortunately, there are very few scripts written about severely physically disabled people, let alone in romance.
Moyes could have tackled society’s view of people with disabilities and sexuality. In the view of many people, just being disabled, in and of itself, takes sexuality away from being human. Instead, this story perpetuates the stereotype of sexually neutral disabled people by painting the picture of a sexually attractive quadriplegic man and then neutering him.
(The most sexually intense scene between Lou and Will is a few kisses.)
Instead we get a tragedy. We get thousands upon thousands of people with disabilities who will finally see a character like themselves on the big screen in a real Hollywood blockbuster who chooses to end his own life because being disabled is too hard.
Even though Will gets the girl, has ridiculous amounts of money, power, oh and A CASTLE, he can’t imagine living life with a ridiculously higher quality of life than most people with disabilities will ever be afforded.
So, if the movie isn’t about them getting it on or Will’s triumph over adversity, what is the point of the movie?
Will is a plot device.
The book was never about Will. The story is about Lou and how Will’s influence changes her life. Lou fails to show Will the joy that can still be had in the world, even if you find love, because you are dealing with some sort of disability.
Goodreads interviewed Jojo Moyes at one point directly asking if she consulted with anyone with quadriplegia before writing the book:
“Not quadriplegics. The thing that really informed it was a member of my family who suffers from a progressive disease. I have been involved in feeding her, taking her out, and that kind of thing.”
While it’s disturbing she did not conduct any interviews with people who are actually quadriplegic, Moyes has a deaf son. She’s personally seen the attitudes some people can exhibit around her son calling the negativity “frustrating” in the same interview. She knows what it’s like to have people presume things about you or your loved one without actually knowing them.
Supporters of this book hope it will help open a dialogue on the subject of assisted suicide. But what a lot of able-bodied supporters don’t understand is when you are living life as a quadriplegic person, you’re dealing with the dark themes presented in the book and movie every day.
I’ve had perfect strangers walk up to me and ask if “my dick works.” I’ve had the heart-wrenching conversation with lovers explaining the restrictions on my life and how those restrictions would affect them. I’ve had people literally say to me “I’m not as strong as you. If I was in your position I would’ve killed myself.”
In real-life, the girl doesn’t always get the boy, sometimes people decide to commit suicide, and love doesn’t conquer all.
The Christopher Reeves foundation released a brief but powerful statement on the movie:
“Me Before You touches on poignant themes about what it is like to both live with a spinal cord injury and care for someone as a family member and caregiver.
However, while Jojo Moyes’ book is defined as fiction, the character of Will Traynor is very real to 5.6 million Americans living with paralysis. At the Reeve Foundation, our mission includes enhancing quality of life, independence and health for all individuals living with paralysis.
The Reeve Foundation does not believe disability is synonymous with hopelessness or that living with a spinal cord injury is considered a fate worse than death.
“Disability does not sideline or disqualify someone from living a full and active life. Everyone living with paralysis can live boldly.”
After the former man of steel himself, Christopher Reeve, was in an accident leaving him completely quadriplegic, his wife Dana wrote how to be a wife, not a caretaker. That yes, there are some parts of someone’s care that can be challenging, but ultimately, you’re still human. A woman and a man in love, lust.
You see, for people like me, Christopher Reeves, and millions of other people who have quadriplegic conditions, this isn’t just a movie. This is people seeing a misrepresentation of what it’s like to be quadriplegic. It’s like if Hollywood took your life and focused on the darkest hours, ignoring all the triumphs, and only noted the worst-case scenario.
There are so many “meet cute” heartfelt, endearing, hilarious, sweet and tear-jerking parts of being in a relationship with someone who has a disability that you will probably never get to see on the big screen.
You probably won’t get to see a character working out like Rocky to be able to stand for just a moment on his wedding day like my friend, Marco, did. You probably won’t get to see a character smacking her boob off furniture trying to get into sexual positions more convoluted than the Kama Sutra like my girlfriends have done. You probably won’t get to see anything like most of the perfect romance or rom-com stories I know because getting Hollywood to back these kinds of plots in books or movies is difficult, and the one time they did it was written by an author who didn’t even bother to interview quadriplegic people.
The reason we’re seeing so much of an outcry from the disability community is that people with disabilities are often pigeonholed into inspiring others to “live boldly.” A quadriplegic man “sacrificing himself” so that his love can live “a better life” isn’t a heartwarming sacrificial moment, it’s a heartbreaking confirmation of our worst fears. Because our culture is so heavily rooted in Hollywood, young quadriplegic people could see this movie where the “hero” commits assisted suicide as confirmation that the demons in their head might be right. Maybe life isn’t worth living. Maybe the burden is too great.
So, I’m here to ask you, aspiring writer, please don’t make the same mistakes. If you’re going to write about a minority or disability, do the same level of research you would do about a foreign land or a subject you have never personally experienced. Realize that you could accidentally be playing into the fears of a group you’re trying to support.
Please remember that people with disabilities are not plot devices.
To those who are not writers: Please don’t approach random people in wheelchairs and ask if their private parts work.
(Edited to add: best to not approach any stranger to ask them anything about their privates. — c.)
