When Bravery Fails

All---

So a good writing friend of mine e-mailed me directly after I posted about being brave and asked if I would still feel so strongly in favor of taking the brave chance if my bravery had come to naught.   I answered her but thought it was an excellent question and wanted to address it in some way publicly.

It's taken me a little while to decide how I want to approach this.  Finally, I decided to be straightforward up to a point and just beg your indulgence for the places where I fall short of complete vulnerability.  Because the truth is, I have been brave and failed.

There was the time when I showed a girl a group of oblique, experimental love stories to the girl they were about, knowing she was intelligent, and hoping she would get the message.  "I wish someone would write stories like that about me," she said.  "Someone did," I told her, holding my breath.  "I know," she said. Her eyes sparkled dreamily.  But my love was mature and adult and she wasn't ready for that.

There was the time I held a photography exhibition in college as a non-art major, something rarely done at my school.  It was the most public exposure of my creativity.  I took a chance in my subject matter and approach, sort of bridging the gap between art and photo journalism.  The exhibition was an utter failure, and I heard almost nothing but a week of terrible comments.  There were exceptions, a few who got what I was doing, but most thought it was boring, uninspired, unoriginal.

There was the time when I was a kid and I gutted out a surgery that had a long, painful recovery and ended up not resolving the issue.

There was the archaeology expedition in the middle of nowhere in Alaska where I fell and cut my neck open with a log in a river that was thick with bacteria and decay.

There is the list of foods that I still cannot eat because of smell associations from the maceration room.

There is all the work, dedication, and excitement that went into relocating from Alaska back to Indiana to go to grad school and pursue forensic anthropology, only to find out, at the end of an incredibly painful year that I have a long-diagnosed, severe learning disability that did not interfere with field work but made the graduate classes literally just about impossible, meaning that I had just short-circuited my entire academic career by taking a chance on a second masters rather than taking either a safer-bet PhD program or research assistantship.  My life, in many ways, remains in a vortex because of that.

So, yes, sometimes you act in courage and things don't work out.

But then, other times you act in courage, and you get to jump out of helicopters into swamps, dig in cemeteries from 3000 BC, evade a drug cartel in Mexico, help put away a man who killed three people on a whim, or marry your precious soul mate.

And when you don't win, at least you were brave.  Acting in fear, you never win, and at the end of the day all you have is your fear.

Even with the trade-off losses, bravery wins.

.Nevets.

The Author's Power to Choose

All---

Don't ever underestimate the power an author has through his or her choices in how to structure a book.  Structure can change everything.  I'm encountering this right now with Sublimation.  One structural choice will determine virtually everything about the reader's takeaway.

Right now, as I fight through to get my momentum back, I'm cherry-picking interest plot points from my chapter-run outline and writing those, pulling my mind back into the world of the book.  I'm also trying to hit the scenes I've basically pre-written in my head.

I have virtually the entire last chapter written in my head, and so I started pounding away on that tonight, even though I haven't touched several chapters prior to it.

The last chapter is basically comprised of two scenes that are tied together thematically and symbolically, but are not truly interdependent.  I can put the two scenes in either order.  What I realized tonight is that the choice I make in terms of which to put first will completely control what most readers think the book is.  One scene is bittersweet at best, poignant  at least, certainly black, and downright bleak.  It concludes with one strong implication of philosophical intent.  The other scene is much more optimistic and hopeful, promises realized with great hope for the future, even  if tinged by regrets.  And it concludes with an entirely different implication.

So the order will determine not only the tone and mood that the reader walks away with, but what a majority of them think the "moral" or "point" is.

On the one hand, the realization of this power is pretty cool.  I can change the entire book just by how two scenes in one chapter are arranged, without altering any content whatsoever.  On the other hand, it's pretty daunting.  Wow, what a decision to have to make.

For tonight I'm going to write it how I had originally planned to before I realized the difference the order could make, but I will definitely be thinking about this a lot over the next little while.

Anyone else run into that kind of structural decision in their writing?  Or even in their reading?

.Nevets.

Now listening to... Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.

Scaring Myself

All---

Sometimes I scare myself with my writing, and that's not a sly way of saying I'm "scary good" or so effective that my sense of suspense gets to even me. The subject matter may or may not be inherently scary. The writing may or may not be of any quality. What scares me is what my writing reveals is inside me somewhere. Sometimes, I would rather it not be there.

"Pre-writing" is what I call it when I'm thinking about what I'm going to write and playing around with the actual sentences and structures in my mind. Right now, I'm pre-writing a short story that literalizes certain aspects of Hegelian philosophy. Sounds really dry, right? It plays out as a first person chronicle of becoming a sociopathic killer. Sounds less dry, yes?

I'm not sure I'm in love with the fact that I can identify enough with a sociopathic killer to write a first person story from that perspective. It's a little creepy. I know authors do things like that all the time. I've read stories like that and never been bothered. But writing it myself? Looking at those dark, terrible words and knowing they're in my voice? That's a whole other experience, and I'm not always comfortable with it.

It's true that I am endorsing neither the sociopathic lifestyle, nor necessarily the Hegelian philosophy that led me down that path. I am exploring. I am playing with ideas by playing with words. It's also true that dark, terrible words reflect a reifying of philosophical abstracts from generations ago. They do not reflect my own thoughts. They interpret someone else's. Even so, the voice is my own. And, like most (many?) authors, I am pretty immersed in what I write or pre-write, so the voice is not even my own through a distant echo. It's pretty intimate.

And that's what scares me.

How easily some aspect of my personality can take on the thoughts and motivations of a sociopathic killer and feel them intimately.

Not sure what to make of that, but there it is.

.Nevets.