My God, I have no idea how to start this.
Oh wait, that's a start, I guess. Never mind.
With that bit of awkwardness out of the way, I guess we can continue. Today we're going to try and talk about forging on, about plowing ahead when all the odds are against you, putting your head down and your shoulder into it when everyone else says you're crazy and that you should turn back. About entering into a zone of peril and danger, an unmarked territory where anything can happen, because nothing is certain and nothing is sacred. A place where-
Jesus. Even I don't believe this crap. Why do you people let me go on like that? What I'm talking about is the second chapter, the place where you start to prove that you're serious about finishing this here story thing. I've discussed this before, during the course of Gabe's story, but it's possible we have some newcomers or that some of you weren't paying complete attention (gasp! say it ain't so!) so I'll restate it, in a different way, to avoid looking like I'm repeating myself. I'm all about illusion. If you think you know what I said, then you probably aren't paying attention.
So. What did I say? Second chapters. I'm probably overstating my own case in saying that the second chapter is crucial, most of my stories really don't start to kick into gear until the fifth chapter or so, when all the players are introduced and the plots start circulating. But I also tend to have like fifty plots going on at once. In "Reunions", there really seems to be only one plot, so if we're up to chapter five and the story hasn't started yet, then something probably isn't right. Needless to say, anyone can do a first chapter, everyone has in their heads the fantastic beginning to a great story, a hook that will engage people from the first page, an image that will capture their attentions and make them keep reading. The problem then, is sustaining that. You get to chapter two and you have all these great ideas in your head and the question begs, "Now what?" What do you do? How do you proceed? I think a lot of people wind up stopping there and it's a shame. Most of the time we don't think it through, we come up with a great idea and start it and think, "Well the rest of the story should just come." That's not always true. In a good story, if you have a decent beginning then the ending will practically write itself. However, getting there is the key part. As much as I make fun of myself for making stuff up as I go along (which I do, but that's not the point, work with me here) the thing with writing is that you can't just start writing when you have the kernel of an idea in your head. That's not fertile ground. I get some delight in just pure improvisation sometimes but I think you need some experience before you can riff on a theme like that and go somewhere with it. Plus I never use it with the intent of turning it into a novel, I mean, I could but that involves those dreaded words "second draft" and "revision" and I barely have time to get the first draft down. I'd rather get it right the first time, thank you.
But what I'm saying here is that, as a writer, you can't come up with a spiffy idea and simply plow ahead without really thinking of where you're going with it. What are the consequences? Where is it all going to lead? When I first plot a story out I have the germ of the idea, the central concept but then I have to imagine all the little bits and pieces that I'm going to throw in, the thrust of the story, the general direction that everything is going to go in. If I don't stop and think about it, if I just started without realizing what I was doing I doubt I'd get very far. I'd stall and flounder and eventually the story would start to reflect that. Most of the time I think about a story for weeks before I sit down and write it. There are very few occasions in my life where I've just launched right into the story and rarely have those circumstances been very pleasant.
Gah. Here I am, talking about myself again. Just like the song says. Alas, all I know from writing is my own experiences, which aren't really substitutable for anyone else. But we'll try, dammit. We'll do our best. If you can't plot out some sort of arc for the story, even if in the beginning it's "this happened and then this happened and then this happened" then you should probably take a step back and think about the tale some more before you sit down to really hammer it out. You can be a little freeform about it, I tend to use what I like to call the "San Francisco-Denver-Chicago-New York Method", which I first heard coined by Neil Gaiman back in the day . . . basically it states, "I know I'm starting in San Francisco, and I have to end up in New York and along the way I'm making stops in these other cities . . . how I get there is my own business though". I like doing it that way because it keeps things loose enough so that you're less likely to write yourself in a corner. As long as I know which spots I'm heading toward I can steer the story in that direction while also going off on any tangents that I might deem interesting. For me, it works. The downside? You have to know what you're doing or else you're going to get a tale that's just spinning its wheels. The other downside is that you lose a sense of tight plotting. What the heck does that mean? Well, it means that your stories have might have a tendency to balloon out of control and veer towards rambling at some very odd moments. Again, if you're good you can make this all seem very natural and a lot of my favorite books (Gravity's Rainbow again and Ulysses are notorious for this) I like because of that sense of rambling. However, I don't read a lot of spy fiction or gripping adventure novels either, where a lack of pacing might be seen as a demerit. I enjoy epic sprawl, I like the sense that anything can happen while you're writing the story. During the course of "Common Things Happen Commonly" I made an offhand comment during a meeting of the group of mindbenders about how one of them was supposed to come and didn't make it. I had no original intention of doing anything with it but eventually that simple comment wound up evolving into a major part of the story and a big portion of what propelled the story's final momentum. For me, at least, that approach works.
Now, before you say "hot dog, that sounds like the approach for me!" consider how many people actually read my stuff. Yeah. Makes one pause for a second, eh? Take my advice with a large lump of salt, if you will.
If poor Mr. Kutsch is reading this and thinking, "Why is telling me all this? I finished my story" well then he'd be absolutely right. This advice, for what it's worth, is sort of wasted on him because "Reunions" is actually finished and hopefully over the course of the year we're going to go through it chapter by chapter and see if we can pick out how to develop plots and characters and all that other fun stuff that I don't get to talk about when discussing peoples' short stories. Perhaps, God willing, we'll even be able to make several running tasteless jokes in the process. Because that's what keeps people coming back. My effortless and endless wit.
I know, I can hear you all shuddering from here. But the rest of you aren't off the hook just yet. Now let's sit up straight, put your pencils down and try to get through this chapter without making it longer than the story itself. Which is probably too late at this point but the reason we keep going on is because we have hope. Well, that may be while you go on. I go on because nobody has stopped me yet. Just try. Come on. I dare you.
I did like the first chapter, to be honest, I thought it was readable and a good introduction to the story. But, on the other hand, I thought it was a little too breezy at times and suffered from a certain lack of depth. Which I really didn't harp on because it's only the first chapter. It was good news though that this chapter was a big improvement in that respect, fleshing out the main character in a familiar way without losing the tone that was settled on during the first chapter and even moving the plot forward a tiny bit in the midst of all that exposition. There's a little bit more of a "voice" now, you get the sense that someone is narrating it as opposed to some neutral third-party just droning on about what's going on in the story. There's a bit of flair to the words now, we get a glimpse of the personality behind the sentences. Which is an important thing in first person narration, you can't lose sight of the fact that this is a person telling you this story, as tempting as it is to just go the easy route and describe what's going on in as bland a fashion as possible . . . I always try to make the rhythms follow someone's speech, like they're actually sitting there talking to me and telling me these things. So occasionally you get random asides, anecdotes, comments on action, all the things that let you know that you're not reading the transcript of an impartial observer. There's a man here and he's telling us this and maybe he's telling the truth and maybe he isn't. But we have no choice but to listen because he's our only entry point.
It follows the path of memory easily enough though and we can see how each thought just sort of flows into the other. The best parts are actually the exposition, the dialogue to me still feels a bit flat, perfunctory I guess is the right word, servicing the plot without really illuminating anything. I'd be curious to see how things change once he actually goes to the reunion (we all know he's going, right?) and is mingling among people he hasn't seen in a long time. A good test of dialogue is being able to do several people at once and have each person be distinctive so that you don't even have to really know who's talking in the "he said" "she said" sort of way, you can throw the words out there and people can figure it out. However, all we've seen him talk to so far are his parents, which may be allow us to be a good judge of how things are going to go. Give it time, then, please. The real meat of the story, however, lies in those expository passages finally giving us some background on our protagonist and what this all means to him. The prose takes on more of a muscular flow at this point and sounds a lot more confidence, as if this portion of the story is far more interesting to the author, and all the other stuff is just killing time to get to this point. Everything else has just been prelude. This is why we're here, to learn about the relationship that went wrong.
And other things, as well. You can try one of a few tactics when attempting this sort of thing, this look back into the past. Nostalgia is the wrong approach and the author doesn't go in that direction fortunately. If you stare at things through too much of a "everything was better" haze then it becomes cloying and annoying, making the main character strangely bitter, unable to move on. Better to say "things were different back then, better in some ways, not as good in others" and be done with it. For those of you out there who know how to do research, you could always go and make it real period-specific, looking up newspaper articles, trying to gauge the feelings of the times, the underlying social conditions, the fever of the day. Each decade feels different, although you don't realize it until you're not in it anymore and you have a chance to assess. When you're smack dab in the middle of it, it all feels like just another day. The other route is to make the whole affair sort of timeless, so it's clearly young people running around and it's clearly not happening today but at the same time, it's not tied to any specific time period. The author kind of goes in between those two options, I get the sense that the flashbacks are set in the seventies, with references to cars and bands, but otherwise he leaves little mention of any other background happenings of the day (granted, high school kids may not have cared for such things as political or social upheaval, heck sometimes I don't care today). There's one point where the teenagers are singing a Billy Joel song, which could date the story somewhat . . . except that my friends used to do the same thing. I may not know much about Mr. Kutsch, but I can assume that he's no teenager. Neither am I, for that matter, (God how it hurts to admit that) but I think he's further away than I am. No offense, just saying it like it is.
I do like how there's a sense of knowingness to the whole affair, especially about some of the more clichéd elements of the setting . . . the idea of two different high schools, one rich and one more middle class, is something we've seen in a million different stories, which the narrator basically admits and I give credit to the author for not making this some kind of class warfare story, like The Outsiders (or to use the Language of Now for Today's Kids . . . The OC). If he is, it's not obvious at first, but it seems to me that the story acknowledges there are rich people and there are people who aren't so rich and the rich people tend to have more things, because they have more money. Is it fair? Not really, I guess, depending on how much of a socialist you are (now I'm dragging in political theory, can this column get anymore ludicrously highbrow) but that's just the way things are. You can't really change how much money your parents make or even how they spend it. All you can do is live with what you have. It's a simple point but the story could have gotten a lot of melodrama out of the have/have not angle. So not going there and choosing to focus on the relationships, between the narrator and his lost love and his relationships with his friends (which I assume we'll see more of as the story winds on), it makes the story have that much more of an impact. Not that a story intersecting all the socioeconomics levels of this tiny society would have been unwanted but sometimes you have to know your focus. There are different ways that people could have tackled this, there are different ways I would have done this but so what? Those don't matter right now. There are no such things, and this is not an original thought, as bad ideas. Simply bad executions. One of the things I like about writing, and maybe this can be extended to people in general, is that we can take something that I would do one way and present the same scenario to a totally different person and they would probably tackle that same scenario in a different way. That's how it goes.
He does a good job of capturing the spirit of teen romance. When you're that young all romances take on the echo of forever, it all seems so much larger than life, holding hands becomes an example of so much more. Your hormones are flaring over the top and it's blowing up everything, turning every gesture into a symphony, simply because it all feels so new. Now that we're all jaded adults, we take such things more matter-of-factly but for teenagers everything is epic. Widescreen, even. Which of course is what makes reading about such things so much fun, albeit a tad bittersweet. He details the little bits nicely, cuddling on the couch and watching movies, walks on the beach, going out with friends, without turning the whole thing into a Bruce Springsteen song. It's a nice, normal relationship, the kind that high schoolers the country over have had for decades and are probably having as we sit here and read this. Nothing earth shattering, this isn't a love that will move the heavens, or go down in time as a legend in amorous occurrences, it's simple, stupid teenage love, two people who enjoy each other's company and want to be together and are together, for a while. It feels like forever, but it's only a while. That's how these things work and the author catches the whirlwind aspect of it in just a few paragraphs, relating how nice it is to feel comfortable around someone and just be with them without really going overboard and making it all sappy and soapy and so on. He's remembering how it was, as clearly as he can, with the implication that he's not unbiased. But none of us are, in the end.
The disintegration is handled well, also, which actually did impress me. I think too much in stories we're influenced by movies and other media that tell us relationships have to end in huge screaming matches, where the people are shouting at each other under the cover of a sudden thunderstorm, trying to make themselves heard against the crack of thunder. Sometimes they do end that way, but I think as the poet told us, more often than not they end in a whimper. People change and that's not a new thing or an original thing. Especially in high school, where all the children are liquid mercury, shifting in response to temperature and atmospheric conditions at a moment's notice. When you're in high school, the person you start out as freshman year generally isn't the person you wind up being once senior year hits . . . unless you're me and impervious to change. No, I changed a little. But only a little. That's all you'll get out of me. Back to the story. The author depicts the way Bobby and Trish basically just drifted apart over time, whether because familiarity breeds contempt and she just wanted to see someone new, try something different . . . or it was just the slow drift of time catching up with them. We rarely marry the first person we date, no matter how much we'd like that to be true. Sometimes we don't marry at all, as the main character has proven to us (though I'll be surprised if that doesn't change in some fashion by the time we reach the end). But the finish to it all seems realistic to me, the way it just peters out and falls apart without really resulting in any kind of catharsis. It's there one day and the next day it isn't and you really can't point to a time when the fallout began. That's the way it goes sometimes and I like the tone in this section, how the narrator isn't really condemning anyone, relaying it all in the cool tones of memory, saying "this is how it was" without really judging anything. But it's clear that the narrator saw the breakup as the only path possible, not the best or the most prudent but the only choice he could take. It was the way things were going and we get a sense of some regret, the same that any of us have, the usual "what if" questions that could plague us to the end of our days, if we let them. All of us have had relationships that have ended without any kind of satisfying resolution, where we still have lingering fondness for the other person, where we don't like them enough to be around anymore but sometimes, when it's dark out and we're sitting alone in the house and there's no one around to call, you think of a person that you used to know and the things you used to tell them and what they would say in response . . . you might almost call them, in moments like that, if you knew the number. Your fingers could find the buttons, like they were worn into the phone. The old feelings come back and you conveniently forget that you're not with them anymore, because you know that they would understand how you feel, you could lapse into that secret code all couples have, the in-jokes, the little touches, the gestures that are shorthand for everything. When it goes, it's like cutting off an arm and if you can't bring yourself to hate them, then something still remains, long after the crater has grown cold. Memory does that to us, it's a tricky ghost, allowing us only to remember the good times and submerge the reasons that you're not together anymore. You know it's best if you stay apart, but it's hard to say that and sound convincing sometimes.
I think in a way this chapter will serve as the bedrock for everything else that is going to come along in future chapters. Sure there will be other revelations and other memories but I think the crux of everything is hidden in these flashbacks, in these bits of exposition masquerading as memories. It's skillfully handled, summarized with a sure voice, so that you could imagine him sitting across the table and telling you these things. It stalls the plot for a bit but the plot requires this information so that's not really true. And in the end it leaves us with a question and a hint that things are progressing somewhere. Maybe we can guess it, maybe we can't. But it's clear that there's a path being drawn for us and we're being taken down it and we can either stop here and let things be as they are, or continue down and see where it goes.
I, for one, vote to keep going. But I'm just one voice. The rest of you have to decide for yourselves.
Nice work, all around. Hopefully we'll be able to pick this up next time.
• MB
"All words escape me every time he looks at me and I hated the way we talked as if there was nothing really important to say 'till I noticed how he stuck around every time I wished he would stay . . ." - Sarge, "Stall"
2.15.06
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