Sometimes bad habits are best repressed. Sometimes they only work themselves out through this kind of thing:
Show don’t tell show don’t tell show don’t tell. Foreclose the possibility of cliché, lock out everything except objects. Describe through consumption of paper, ink, bottles of cola, slices of pizza. Measure idiosyncrasies in teaspoons of sugar dumped into coffee—too many or too few—or maybe Equal or Splenda or Sweet ‘n Low coupled with fears about carcinogens. What does it say about mental state? Fear of death embodied in artificial sweeteners or calories. Fat dripping from slices of pizza and hot dogs and hamburgers and beers consumed just about directly out of the pitchers.
What kinds of pitchers? Sweating, dripping pitchers, of course. What do the beads of liquid look like? Droplets, jewels, instances of humidity’s contact with the cold surface of glass or plastic or Styrofoam. Chewed ice cubes in mixed drinks, these all stimulate and break teeth.
Teeth, there’s a whole litany of objects there, ignored and otherwise. Frayed toothbrushes that should have been replaced in November. Floss, bought during a self-improvement binge with the mouthwash, gum ointment, whitening creams that come in syringe-shaped applicators, plastic trays for whitening creams. (Not to mention the cabinet-full of worthy objects for signification in the cabinet: Clearasil, Q-Tips, talcum powder, hair gel, Old Spice—my side of the shelf versus the roommate’s—boundaries laid down across various surfaces visible and otherwise.)
What do these objects do in real life? What do they do here? Did you think this was some kind of reflection of real life? Did you think that this “here” was something akin to the “here” that you occupy now?
If it seems indeterminate, I want to propose an experiment:
Experiment
Well, picture me then striding down the street on a cold winter’s day and what do you assume? Take a second and picture the hat, scarf, collar-upturned pea-coat with hands in pockets. You missed the iPod headphones slinking out from under the hat and disappearing into the pocket with gloved (yes, gloved, imagine the gloves as objects that are coming into contact with my skin even at this very moment) hands. Jeans, Chucks, the usual markers of a middle class kid walking—well, where?
Here’s the tricky part. Assign a destination, a kind of final target for this moving, breathing object (that, incidentally, I have already claimed is me in a certain authorially authoritative sense of saying me) to this container of objects. Hurtling through space and time toward some destination that not only has significance for the person, the subject, the thing—but also for the reader. Because, let’s face it, if we’re talking fiction here, this is a kind of collaborative project.
What kind of hurtling through space induces a swoon for the reading public? How about the notion of hurtling itself? Hurtling as in through space as the Earth turns? Hurtling toward some kind of encounter with a foreshadowed or foreseen plot arrangement? Let’s say for example:
David dies in episode 15 of Theoretically So’s “500 Words Per Day.”
Or does he? Who dies? What dies when I write “David dies?”
Believe me, I’m dying to know too. Papa Hemingway says to let the story take over. To let it drag itself out, to grind the gears together and against each other, gnashing against the machinery of the artificer’s efforts, until it whispers along like two parallel skis through fresh powder. Until no sensation of the production of words remains except for the fluid passing of idea from individual to public. From mind to page. From ether to concrete medium for consumption. The story evolves when you least expect it. And it stalls when at 2 am. It sits and stares, like a cat perched comfortably, contently, mockingly on top of the couch.
Like Henrietta the Cat. The Cat that Lilly owns. The reason someone needs to take Claritan.
Who? There was that girl Kelly, perfectly nice: but are we talking inspiration for a character or are we talking a reference to get started? She after all, definitely didn’t speak Japanese, and as far as I know wasn’t exactly enjoying herself over our martinis anyway.
Which only goes to demonstrate how memories can produce inspirations, autobiographical horseshit, or something else altogether.
These reflections belong somewhere, perhaps not here. My (my? MY! My.) authority ends at the placement of a stamp on the final product of thought.
Until the words creep. They knock at doors in the middle of the night and reveal their tricky intentions, previously hidden by the beauty of their objective presence. Looks deceive the unprepared writer (or, let’s be honest, reader fudge television frying pan frog princess face).
Put another way, take the idea of immersive object-relations:
Henry looked in the desk. Back there in the dark corner with the Forever Stamps and the pen that his father gave him for his High School Graduation, he found a lost notebook. The one he thought he had lost on a plane four months prior. Four months of the occasional thought of his words floating out there somewhere. Found by some air traveler in the seat pocket, next to a pair of hairy used United headphones and a copy of Destinations Magazine (with the SuDoKu already filled out—incorrectly).
And now, it proved to be in front of him, literally, for no fewer than 120 days. How much time and hair and effort lost searching for the object that sat no farther than 12 inches from his hands when he typed at night: “It’s gone. Let it go, let it go,” he had typed over and again repeating the words until the loss of his creative object felt something like a simple rhythm that undergirded everything else.
Let it go let go let it go letitgoooooo letiIT Go llleeettt iiittt gggooo!!! Let it FreakGING Go!
