Don’t Agonize: Reflections on 3 Stories
A poetry professor I had once talked to me about being a writer. He was talking to his father, who had just gotten into glass blowing after a lifetime of many hobbies, who talked about his collection of hobbies (which he was dedicated to and learned from) as a variety of hats which he could put on and become when he wanted. He said to my professor that this was likely what being a writer was like--and the professor said no. Being a writer is not so much a hat which he, or I, or I’m likely to say most writers, simply put on in order to be it: we are always it. It is just how we come at the world, it colors every interaction, it is how we process and understand. I didn’t sense he was romanticizing and I certainly could not say I did not empathize, and appreciate, his story.
It was the prompts this month that I felt I did my best work, work that mattered to me in many small ways--personally, yes, but also as a practicing writer. “Harold and Gladys” is a story which needs a great deal of work, a complete re-working to emphasize themes which came through only after writing. I wasn’t happy with it when I posted it although the thoughts shared helped me actually begin to appreciate it as a story with potential. Yet I think that it is the prompts which have helped me realize the most about my place as a writer and the relationship I have with creating stories--which is a revelation which seems invaluable. I hope this reflection demonstrates my growth over this (extended) course as a writer in the learned craft and the intuitive art of it.
When I wrote “More Than Kin, Less Than Kind,” I was thinking about what it would mean to be eroded by time and wasted potential. It is a story about a man who describes himself neatly in a way as to perfectly serve these themes. It would be almost too on the nose if I wasn’t pulling it in some significantly representative ways from real life. It wasn’t just enough to have a miserable man, beaten down by what feels to be a life of failure, because that’s not a plot--it’s just misery on a page. It’s just sitting there, wondering if AA was really worth it and how many people can actually get away with just drinking sometimes, and what it needed was purpose: a reason to be. Although I didn’t want that misery just sitting there didn’t mean I wanted it removed, if anything I wanted it highlighted. Misery needed a foil, which seemed so naturally to be Love. We needed to see hope in order to fully appreciate what it means to be so worn down by pain that hope is, in fact, hopeless. Joseph isn’t just in misery, he is Misery, it has become his entire identity and Love, the young woman he works with, is perhaps one of the only people who offers him connection and a reason to be--it is a very honest, intimate. Misery can’t love because then Misery can’t be what it is and, Joseph being a certain kind of man made of misery, no longer believing himself to be a certain kind of man made for genuine goodness, reports her for harassment-- not just to push her away but shove. There is conflict in this story, but it’s deep-rooted and, like the trauma in Olga’s stories, transmittable to others in unsuspecting ways.
“Milagro” is put together by thoughts on trust and slow-burn betrayal. It is also about victimization and isolation. Sam is Joseph in a different form, now he’s a father and he doesn’t drink--he just projects and he stagnates. The relationship here has an age gap for obvious reasons, but Sam’s old in many ways. He’s like the crust on the juice container, just getting crunchy on the rim while the juice is still good inside--he’s not Misery, like Joseph, but he’s blind justification. He is a man who believes his age gives him insight by default, but he mistakes wisdom for assumption. He assumes to know his daughter, but he can only see her--and everything else--through himself. Sam is full of guilt, which burns him up inside, which feels like it is burning every ounce of him, every time he thinks about the promise he made to his daughter about getting her a dog if she got good grades. His daughter didn’t just want a dog, she wanted the very thing that Sam is frustrated about: companionship. She is not like other kids at school, she is introverted and shy, but Sam signs her up for softball 3 years in a row--he won’t see her for who she is, only for who he wants her to be. His lie carries the weight of isolating forever someone already isolated, who can no longer trust and has no one to take comfort in, but is subject to the assertion of Sam--who’s guilt eats him up, but who continues to insist he is right. They’re both lonely, Sam and his daughter, and there are so many reasons they continue to grow farther apart.
Klinkenborg spoke about dissipating the mystique of “flow” as the “real” writing, seeing it as not like the pour of a teapot but like the release of a dam: it is the purging of words onto paper, but not the act of writing. It begins the writing, but is not the writing. That’s the part we often neglect, even resist and resent, which we often think of as “editing” -- but it is the process of crafting the work When I wrote both pieces, a delicate pour was impossible as everything felt torrential and both of these stories fail in the same way to communicate: they lack in clarity, they’re cohesive but ambiguous, they’re the disorganized thing you explain through an emotional rush to purge it from your thoughts--yeah, it makes sense but you’ve assumed too much of the listener at certain times and they’re lost in the frenzy of words. Craft was impossible to me, I couldn’t have managed to hold a teapot, I was in agony. I could only purge.
“A War in Three Acts” is built on disillusionment more than anything else. It shares a lot in common with “More Than Kin” but where Joseph had crafted an identity around his pain, Fortin has absolved himself of identity entirely to avoid pain. He feels himself shedding everything and Tanner, who is consumed in defining himself and labeling himself--coward, war hero, husband, son, gambler, slaughter--and when that’s robbed from him, in the way horrible things like war pilfer precious things like that, he’s resentful of the people who can keep surviving. The ones who find a way to wield that pain like a weapon, while some of us can never learn how not to carry it by the blade. Trauma takes something and I’m not sure it is feasible to be a living human, a fresh human, and not have something else end up replacing it, whether you want it or not, like scar tissue. “A Matter of Perspective” is rumination on what it means to love, really love, to speculate about love at its absolute heart--which I certainly didn’t have an answer for and neither does Mark. What I can only say is that it comes in many forms because people come in many forms, we see life in many ways and it shapes us--sometimes deeply, brutally--in many forms as well. If love could only be understood one way, then it certainly can’t be understood as blood, or as care-taking, or as sex but it seems certain that whatever it looks like it can be beautiful, but grotesque as well.
These are better works. They’re structured, there’s payoff, they’re streamlined like water flowing because they’re not the purge--they’re writing. They’re raw, which is mentioned, which helps their power, but what makes them effective is that I didn’t purge these stories, I wrote them. I took the debris, brushed off some mess, and tried to clean the grooves. I won’t say there wasn’t pain, but that agony had given way to a dull ache (don’t worry, it only sears when I twist the wrong way or recall certain pleasant things). It was quiet enough that I could write, not just agonize.
I floundered this month and surprised myself with my own inconsiderateness. I agonized about that too, every time I closed a blank document or restarted an introduction for a countless time, although wisdom reminds me “don’t agonize,” and it is right to warn me since it only makes it harder. I appreciate wisdom’s resilience during the fainting spells. There is someone who I sincerely wish I could share these thoughts, these stories with but I’m coming to realize that sometimes things just become too corroded and too old to ever mend. You can only purge, and purge, and let the edit be the real process. There’s never not a time that I am not a writer, and I’m reminded of that when I look over the prompts and see so much reflected in the purge I didn’t before. I have been given advice on how to best work the tools and recognize better that it is often only after creation that the story shows what lies at its purpose. It is then that you really begin to write.
