Paying Attention to What It Means to Write

An epic-fantasy computer game which The Missus and I play every now and then lets your character acquire any of a variety of cool, vaguely medieval-magic weapons. One property which some of these weapons have is called “vampiric regeneration”; while I’m hazy on the details, I think this means (for example) that if you shoot an opponent with an arrow of vampiric regeneration, his or her strength goes down and your own goes up.

Which, in a roundabout sort of way, is the theme of this post.

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably seen a bumper sticker or shirt which reads, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.” Maybe somebody who worries about that prospect has given you one.

(And maybe you’ve repaid them by doing just that, you vindictive little sneak.)

I don’t know, though. Unless you’re doing non-fiction (or more or less non-fictional “memoir”), putting real people in your work not only risks getting first-hand lessons about libel or defamation; it also is just duller than making up your own characters.

Okay, at some level you can’t help “creating” characters who resemble real people — some (most?) of them people you don’t even know. Say you’re sitting in an airport bar, absolutely savoring the interminable freaking wait for your plane’s spare part to be FedExed from Bangalore and feeling murderous about the world in general. Suddenly on the other end of the bar some horse’s ass breaks into song and you realize: He’s singing along with the commercial jingle on the bar TV. At the top of his lungs. You notice that his hairline is receding almost to the point that it’s simpler to say his head is ballooning, and that he’s blinkingblinkingblinking the optical semaphore which says, repeatedly, New contact lenses at work. Mentally you turn back the clock to view this yoyo at age 16. You take pleasure in giving him some grotesque skin condition. You invent a bully who’s tormented him since first grade and is now the student-government president, assigning him menial tasks at pep rallies (like mopping up the gym floor after the sweating masses have left). You picture his first kiss, with the Homecoming Queen at that — or rather, with the Homecoming Queen’s yearbook picture.

Yeah. That’ll show him. That’ll teach him to have been interesting, here and now, to you, a writer armed with the deadliest of weapons: a vampiric imagination.

Not that I know anybody like that guy myself, of course. And if I did, not that I’d ever reward such a flaming idiot by committing his picture to the Web’s permanent page. No. (No.)

In general, as I said, it’s much more fun to simply make up characters out of (as the expression goes) whole cloth. There are limits; the English language has only so many adjectives to describe hair color, for instance. But when you say “Her hair was brown, cobwebbed with the gray of early middle age” that doesn’t mean you promise that such a woman, with such hair, does not exist. You’re not even promising that you’ve never met such a woman yourself.

No, you’re just playing around with words, within the limits of language, and you’re bound to use words which describe somebody, somewhere and at some point in time.

But one real person fascinates every writer, a real person whose very interestingness becomes at some point simply unbearable. You must put this person into a story, you realize. You can’t waste the opportunity.

You know who I mean, right?

Yeah. At some point, you yourself will probably show up in a story of yours — probably as a featured character, and probably as a writer.

This sort of story takes many forms. In the classic one, a teenager writes a story centered around the angst and/or anger of a young man (or woman) banging away at a computer keyboard or scratching the surface of a sheet of foolscap with a nearly dry fountain pen or quill. The protagonist is secluded in a barely furnished upper-floor room in some romantic and possibly tragic city. Paris, say. Vancouver. Birmingham, Alabama. Singapore. He or she — the character, like the character’s creator — dreams of his or her words going out into the world. Touching the heart of a reader. And suddenly the character bursts into song at the top of his lungs, a commerci—

No. Stop right there.

You know what I’m driving at: we fascinate ourselves. And almost nothing fascinates us about ourselves so much as the compulsion to write. Almost certainly, we sooner or later create a character who writes, too. And then the fun begins…

Because the created writer never writes well enough, correct? The created writer’s life will probably be glamorous or poor, tragic or comic, more noteworthy, in short, than the humdrum everyday life of the creating writer. But the latter always holds the trump card: the next key to be pressed on the keyboard or letter scratched out on the paper and, when all else just doesn’t work, the Backspace key. (Which is why fiction writers’ complaints about doctors playing God rings a little hollow.)

For good or ill, I wrote such a story myself some years back. As you’ll see from the excerpt, it begins with the “a writer intrudes on his fictional world” premise but then inverts it (in a way which others have done as well). Maybe, in reading it, you might wonder where the hall of mirrors stops — how much of the writer in this story is John? I’ll certainly never tell. I’ll just be sitting over in the corner, singing at the tops of my lungs…

Anyway, here’s the opening — 4,000 words or so — of “Ivories.” Enjoy!

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P.S. Belated tip o’ the hat to Kate Lord Brown, whose post yesterday must have lodged in my head even though I wasn’t explicitly thinking of it while writing this one.