Tell Me a Story

In the house I lived in on Lookout Mountain, GA (home of "famous" Rock City Gardens, Ruby Falls, "The World's Steepest Incline Railway", and Covenant College (from whence John Hinckley Jr. graduated)), there were two yellow and blue striped (they may have blue and yellow striped, but I think the stripes were about equal size so it's hard to say) arm chairs in which I learned to read. I remember sitting in my mom's lap while she diligently tried to explain to me the purpose of the comma. That conversation went something like this:

Mom : That's a comma. It means pause.
Me : That's stupid! Why don't they just write "pause" there?
Mom : No, it means you pause when you see it.
Me : For how long?
Mom : not very long. Try this sentence.

( sound of page turning )

Me : "We should go now,"

















he said,














"and see what is left!"

Mom : A little too long, dear. Just take a quick break and then keep going.
Me : Gaaaaawwww! How can anyone ever do this right?

I did eventually master the comma, and have been a voracious reader ever since. My early heros were the science fiction giants; names to conjure with : Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury etc. I quickly moved to Fantasy : Tolkein, Silverberg, McCaffrey, LeGuin, Lewis etc. Sometimes my papa would try to introduce me to writers outside of my comfort zone, who wrote books about actual people, or at least people who could not fly, turn invisible, roar, compute, tesseract, or anything else. I enjoyed these books readily enough, but before long my nose would be down in the next book of Susan Cooper's mighty The Dark is Rising series.

To this day, sciene fiction and fantasy books maintain their status as the vast majority of my reading choices. On my shelf right now (see Megan? two topics with one blog!) are:

1. All three of Neal Stephonson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, System of the World)
2. Frank Herbert's Dune (first time through, believe it or not)
3. Stephen R. Donaldson's new Thomas Covenant book, The Runes of the Earth
4. Christopher Moore's Lamb, a book recommended to me by no less than a dozen people, but which I must admit to not finding as funny as everyone else seems to have found it
   
5. Dungeon, Fire and Sword, the most fantasy-sounding title of them all but which is actually a terrific historical recounting of the fall of the Knights Templar in the crusades
   

Why is this? That's probably another blog topic entirely. The short, if misleading answer, is that I spend the large part of my day in a rigorous, extremely linear and logical world, getting computers to do things exactly as I want them to do them, which entails telling them exactly what that is and no more (and certainly no less), and so science fiction and fantasy fill a void. This is only partly true, however, because, and I say this with no false modesty, when you work with computers at the level at which I work with them, there is plenty of creative, outlandish, non-linear thinking to do in order to get anything done at all. Ask me sometime about what I did for 4 years in Indiana and you'll see what I mean.

In actuality, my guess is that the kinds of thinking one does in order to write fiction are very much like the kinds of thinking one does to write things which are rigorously true, i.e. computer code. You conceive an overall vision, and you keep as much of it in your head as you can while you focus on the many and varying details of implementation and execution. Sometimes it's so big you can't keep all of it in your head at once, and so you concentrate on chunks at a time, and when you get one chunk the way you like it you step back and figure out how what you just did affects the overall scheme of things. And there's no limit to the kinds of disciplines to which you can apply a creative technolgoical/philosophical/fantastical field of vision. It's the very best of both left and right brain exercise - it's why I got into computers in the first place (and that makes three).

Given that, then, it's amusing to note that my writing style is almost nothing like my coding style. My code is elegant, precise, minimalistic, and it always, always works. My writing, well - let's say I like to embellish, and it frequently doesn't work so well. Better to say I just outright make shit up all the time. I LOVE telling stories verbally, and when I write stories I tend to write them much like I'd speak them, with all the embellishments, side-tracking, and outright fabrications I can put in, and with WAY too many words. I overuse adjectives, adverbs, any kind of modifier I can grab a hold of I'll throw in there because I like the way it sounds when spoken. I like the rhythm, the cadence of a well constructed turn of phrase.

This is not to say this makes the best reading experience. And it's different depending on what I'm writing. If I'm telling a story about something that actually happened to me I tend to tone this kind of thing down a little bit, as I have a concrete vision in my head of the events, and so my tendancy to exaggerate can be reined in somewhat. It's when I'm writing fiction, and I'm responsible for making up everything, that the extra verbiage piles up. I've been writing the same short story for about 8 years now, and I keep bogging down because, while I have a rough idea of how I want things to go, I don't have a firm grip on the overarching structure, and no real plan of execution, and so I spend too much time being clever in dense areas of story which might be better off simply narrated so as to keep the actual story moving along. When I already know the story I'm much better at delivering.

Perhaps I should stick with memoirs.

All of this said, however, the most powerful writing experience I ever had, to this day, was in the 6th grade. My English class had a short story writing assignment; we had a week to do it, and at the end of the week we would all take an entire period to read our stories out loud to eachother. These were very short stories.

Except for mine.

At the time, I had just finished Shirley Rousseau Murphy's Children of Ynell series, starting with The Ring of Fire and culminating with the utterly stupendous The Joining of the Stone. I had fantasy and epic on the brain, and so my short story was instead a massive construction, The Quest for the Sun Sword, which came to its triumphant conclusion after a disasterous confrontation with an evil being of some type who actually wielded said Sun Sword in battle, resulting in the death of the hero's best friend, whose name, I swear to god, was Kenny. One might ask why, if the Sun Sword was such a great thing to have, did the guy wielding it in battle get his ass kicked?

But I digress.

On the day of revelation I was excited, nervous, eagerly antcipating my triumph. Our Teacher, Ginny Johnson (we all called her Ms. J., or J-Bird), went in no particular order, and so it was fate that put Georgianna George ahead of me in the queue. Now, I could go on a long time about Georgianna George. She was a country girl in a middle class elementary school, but she pretty much out-did everyone around her in pretty much everything - smart, interesting, and I was smitten with her from the start. I think she first came on the scene during 4th grade, and so I had 3 years of unrequited grade schooler passion as a backdrop to this moment.

Georgianna's story was short, simple, and had everyone gripped instantly. It involved a scientific researcher exploring a distant planet, and upon coming across an alien construction of some sort the researcher begins to try to decipher the ruins, only to be torn apart by the beast lurking within. Her description of the ruins were tinged with enough of the familiar to make you think you knew what they were, but shadowed with enough of the alien to make you wonder what you missed. As she read the final paragraph the room was dead silent. She described tendons popping and the horror of the researcher's last moments as she felt her back breaking, just before she died. And then the final blow.

"With a start, Sharon woke from her bed, crying. It was only a dream."

It was only a dream.

Inasmuch as it is possible for 6th graders to become spontaneously riotous, this is exactly what happened after a stunned, disbelieving silence. Miss George delivered her perfectly written story perfectly, with all of the timing and sensibility of a real writer. And at that moment I realized that what I had written was, in fact, crap. And no amount of, well, anything would ever change that. Of course, I was next, and when I refused to read my crap Miss J. threatened me with receiving an F for the lesson. Despairing, I waited for the bedlam to abate, and, finally, began my tale. It was too long, it wasn't very original, and the class clearly lost all interest after about 2 minutes. After Georgianna George's triumph, I felt smaller than small; worthless; a cheap bullshit artist. I ground down to my inevitable conclusion, and received the same smattering of applause that everyone else had gotten.

Everyone but Georgianna George, who as a 6th grader scared the absolute shit out of everyone in the room, including Miss J. I never felt any animosity towards miss George - far from it, in fact. What she did that day only fueled my ardor for her (an ardor which was never requited, alas - in fact, to say that I was unlucky in love as a grade schooler grossly understates the matter); it was inconceivable to me that I should think poorly of someone who wrote such a great story

But it took a long, long time after that before I ever wrote anything else. And I'm sure that, on some level, I am always feeling that feeling of knowing that I'm really not a good writer, and that my epic, convoluted story lines disguise a lack of any real talent for worsmithing. So, the answer to your question, Megan, is this:

I want to have the same effect on a room full of people that a 12 year old girl did 25 years ago.

Is that too much to ask?