Getting It Out of My System (1)

[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my “issues” with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don’t like to do, much — to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of my first book. In a couple days, in part 2, I’ll cover how it got to print. In this part, I’ll try to purge myself of some second thoughts about the book itself. And maybe, in the process, I’ll get the damned monkey off my back.]

Crossed Wires didn’t get many really good reviews, a fact which stunned and wounded its author. On the other hand, I learned that even when reviewers found some honest-to-God fatal flaw, they were nearly always generous enough to close their reviews on an “up” note.

I’ve got a folder of Crossed Wires reviews sitting on the desk here, right by my hand. But I’m not (for now) going to quote specifics. Instead, I’m going to talk in generalities — categories of things which bothered reviewers. The complaints were of three kinds (not all equally easy to dismiss):

1. Complaints about the heroine, Finley’s, depiction as a hearing-impaired person. Surprisingly, these complaints came primarily from individual readers and online communities who were themselves hearing-impaired. The problem was never, He shouldn’t be writing about this stuff. Instead, it was Oh, this isn’t what it’s really like to have a problem hearing… That would never happen with a hearing aid. And so on. While it sort of bugged me, this criticism was the easiest of the three types to ignore — because, of course, Finley’s experiences with deafness and hearing aids had been my own.
2. Complaints about the lack of mystery to this “mystery”: how easily the reader knew in advance who the killer was, how slow on the uptake were the “good guys” (especially Finley). I’ve got no excuses in this department. (On the other hand, as you’ll see in part 2, I had some professional help in mucking up the storytelling.) Unfortunately, the mystery at the heart of any mystery novel, the suspense in any thriller, is its reason for being; even if I’d eliminated complaints of type 1 (above) and type 2 (below), this one alone would have killed the book’s chances for success. And rightly so.
3. Complaints about the writing style. While these didn’t come from the majority of reviewers, they probably stung the most. Somewhere here on RAMH recently, or maybe it was a comment on a blog somewhere, I mentioned that I think of myself more as a writer than as a storyteller. Every family member (of course), every friend, every teacher and school newspaper/magazine advisor I’d had through college, every editor with whom I’d ever corresponded on story proposals and so on… they all agreed: “John can write.” That someone — professionals at that, who by definition must appreciate good writing — that they didn’t join the chorus, well, it just flabbergasted me.

It’s this third sort of critique which I want to talk about here. And I’m not going to argue the point, either. I’m going to agree with it.

Here’s what I’m going to do:

First, I’m going to post without comment the first few paragraphs of the Crossed Wires prologue. (There’ll be a link to the whole thing if by some chance you want to read it.) Following that, I’ll post an equivalent amount of text from the Crossed Wires sequel-that-never-was, called Trapdoor. (With a link to that, as well.)

And then I’ll talk about some stylistic differences between the two, and why I think those stylistic differences matter. Which will lead, finally, to why I’m even doing this exercise publicly (besides the aforementioned need for exorcism).

Here goes. First, a few paragraphs from the beginning of the Crossed Wires prologue:

Excerpt from Crossed Wires: Prologue

Traffic shishes past on a darkening street, early in an autumn evening; the streets are slick with wet brown leaves; overhead, a thin scimitar of a crescent moon is just poking through the clouds, barely illuminating the tumbled-blocks structures of an apartment complex in the suburbs of a large city. Telephone lines shiver and gleam in the wet; death is perched there at first, then effortlessly soars aloft for a moment, stoops, and comes to rest, silently, on the landing outside the door of one apartment.

Through the curtains in the window of this apartment seeps a pale yellow light, echoing the moonlight above, and on the other side of the window, at a desk in a corner of her bedroom, sits a young woman. If we could peek inside this young woman’s mind, we might observe that she is both young enough and old enough to be both always confident with men and always surprised by them; that she has in fact loved many men, with just this mixture of pleasure and confusion, been head-over-heels with a few, even; but that she has never loved any of them in quite the way that she loves what she sees on the glowing green screen of the computer parked here on her desk.

Across the surface of this screen, two, three, or more times a day, dances an ensemble of words written by people whom she has never met and never will meet (none of them, that is, except for one: very briefly, and very soon), people who, like her, sit as though hypnotized before an unblinking glowing rectangle, a green or white or multi-colored eye, their thousand fingers clicking across their keyboards like the chattering of teeth. Meanwhile, spouses and lovers go ignored, children and pets unfed, jobs uncompleted — all put on hold, for now, all for the sake of faraway, invisible friends.

Invisible, yes, but neither nameless nor without substance. Some of her friends’ names are real (a John, a Liz, a Sharon, and others) and a handful are patently fictitious (Butterfly, AntMan, and so on). One friend makes a joke out of everything; one friend is always ill-tempered and discourteous unless you need advice; one friend seems always caught helplessly in some life-tangle or another, and can suffocate you with his dependence if you let him. Minnesota, New Mexico, Georgia, Japan, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, California, England, New York, Virginia, France, Saudi Arabia: yes, they reside in all these places and many more. But they sense one another only through their machines, as if only there do they truly live, inhaling and exhaling — taking life in and expelling it — through a little box attached to each machine, a little box from which snakes a wire umbilicus to the telephone network.

(Read the whole thing)

[wincing, getting a grip] Now, about the same amount of material from Trapdoor:

Excerpt from Trapdoor: Chapter 1

A week later, Volley Santino would stride into Tony’s Barber Shop and get his head shaved.

“Volley?” his boss at the plant would exclaim, the Monday morning after that. “Zat you?” Volley’s live-in girlfriend would move out, citing certain unspecified “irreconcilable differences” but unable to hide a final shudder of distaste at his pale, stubbled noggin. His kid brother would bark his kid-brother laugh and tell Volley that it really did not look that bad but he’d never find a rubber big enough. And Volley’s Ma wouldn’t be able to speak at all; she’d just stand there, wringing her hands, blinking back tears, uncomprehending. (After all, it had not been even four months since she’d “loaned” him the seven hundred fifty bucks he’d needed for the Ultra Membership in Head’o’Hair, Limited.)

Like, who the hell cared? They didn’t have to live with what he’d been trying to live with, did they?

But all that would come afterwards.

Now, at this moment sometime after midnight on a warm Saturday in May, Volley Santino was possessed of this marvelous thatch of thick black curly hair, ever so slightly gone gray at the temples. Volley was sitting on a barstool in McGarrity’s Pub in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the end of the bar closest to the heavy oaken door, and whenever the door thwupped open and shut, a fringe of bangs tickled his narrow forehead in the sudden breeze.

This place had a great selection of jukebox oldies — currently The Drifters and “Up on the Roof” — but, sadly, lacked a mirror behind the bar, which would have allowed Volley to marvel at all dimensions of his tonsorial splendor. Limited as he was to the tactile, his fingers ran ceaselessly through his hair; and with the full force of his mind, he was attempting psychokinetically to manipulate the fingers of the auburn-haired woman at his right to do the same.

Pssst — yo! whispered Volley’s mind, all sibilant urgency. You wanna, like, touch my hair? Go ahead. Come on. Touch it. Touch it. You know you want to….

But it wasn’t working. The woman’s fingers remained curled obdurately around the stem of her wine glass, and she remained deep in superficial conversation with a guy to her right. A guy, as it happened, with a thick mane of wavy, straw-colored hair. He also had a nice mouthful of straight, white teeth that kept flashing at the woman — on, off; on, off — like the guy got a firefly-butt transplant in his jaw or something.

The woman turned to her left a bit to sip at her wine. Not for the first time, Volley glimpsed a corner of the self-adhesive name tag plastered to the saffron fabric of the blouse over her left breast. Hi, Volley knew that it said, My Name Is APRIL.

(Read the whole thing)

---

(Well, I’m certainly exhausted!)

Some observations:

First, the Crossed Wires thing: e-freaking-gad. Could I push any harder? Especially, as here, not pushing to tell a story with some mysterious events, but pushing to dazzle the reader with style. Semi-colons: cripes. Paragraph lengths: horrible. The personification of death. Baroque sentence structure. Imagine a reader, on learning that this is a mystery s/he’s about to open up and begin reading. Imagine the sheer bafflement. Even some touches which, under other circumstance, might be not-half-bad — like that shishes — come across as florid distractions.

Now consider the Trapdoor excerpt. This was written about a year after I wrote the Crossed Wires excerpt, and I gotta say, it sounds like a completely different author. Sure, there’s stuff I’d change now. For instance, I was clearly still getting the hang — or trying to get the hang — of paragraph lengths. (And yet, on average: much more variety, and simply shorter.) There’s some showy diction there: tonsorial; sibilant; psychokinetically.

But on balance, compared to the Crossed Wires bit — maybe not really there yet, but what a difference. And (dare I say it) what an improvement.

What happened in that year? To put one obvious possibility to rest, no: I had not begun taking drugs or abusing alcohol.

All I’d done, really, was… [wait for it]… relax.

You saw the first sign of this comfort level, if you’ve been here for at least a few days, in my story “Modem Operandi.” A sort of wise-guy voice. “Interesting” (not to say bizarre) character names. Phonetic spelling, at times, within dialogue. A slacker rhythm. A sense of humor for chrissake. It’s as though the story’s been taken out of a washing machine, shaken, and hung out to dry on a clothesline — and simply donned, without ironing.

(As an aside, note that the Trapdoor chapter does one other thing, or rather doesn’t do it: It mentions not a single word about technology. Someone who opened Trapdoor wouldn’t immediately be put on the defensive by jargon — however prettied-up and figure-of-speeeched. In Chapter 2, yes, s/he would have to deal with that. A little. But here, at the outset, the goal is obviously just to make the story appealing.)

Did I plan all this out? Nope. I just relaxed. Not to the point of not caring about what I was writing. Just to the point where the writing was about the characters — not about me, and not even about the reader.

Which simply begs the question: Why was I suddenly so relaxed? That will be the subject of Getting It Out of My System (2), forthcoming in a couple of days.

Update, 2008-09-22: Part 2 is now available.