It’s been a year now since I showed up in Seattle for Clarion West. Despite the effect of the feelable unit reduction as you get older – how time slips away faster, with less to show for it – I think this last year might have been the fullest ever, though not, in the final analysis, the most enjoyable, since so many of the feelable units have involved feeling bad.
Still, I’ve been thinking about what the last year has meant; and what the legacy of Clarion has been. Probably the answer should be split in two. The writing-specific part is that I’m better now, by a lot, than I was a year ago. Monica and I were talking about this yesterday, and while the sources of improvement are many and varied, I would say the lion’s share of what skills I acquired in Seattle stem from a single comment, and everything that fell out of that comment:
Week 2, and we were critting my first story, The Mexican. I was nervous because it contained no speculative elements – it was fiction, not science fiction, not fantasy. I was also nervous because my stories tend to be pretty introspective and thoughtful, and reveal a lot of me, and you never know how a revelation like that will be received by almost-strangers. I suppose a resounding thud, then crickets chirping, were the sounds I expected to hear.
So when the overwhelmingly-positive response came I got hit with a dopamine reward-prediction-error rush the likes of which I’ve seldom experienced in life. It was an awesome feeling, and I use ‘awesome’ both in its literal and idiomatic sense. But what wasn’t awesome was Caren’s crit, which started out something like this:
C: Shane, you are a sneaky fucker. I was totally swept up in this, and read like twenty pages before I realized there were no scenes.
Scenes? What?
It fell out then that I didn’t, that I had never, either written or thought in scenes. My ‘stories’ were mental journeys, ruminations, seat-of-the-pants explorations of whatever was obsessing me at the time. The scene – a reasonably self-contained episode where characters want things and do things and something is achieved in the end – was foreign to my repertoire, which is funny, since the scene is the most fundamental building block of any dramatic work. Writing scenes is pretty much the first thing you’d ever learn to do in writing, the bedrock upon which you’d build anything. So typical of me, to ignore two thousand years of accumulated wisdom, and set off in another direction.
Let me be explicit: this is not a compliment. This was not some roguish accomplishment on my part. Caren’s comment illuminated my profound failure to understand the craftsmanship of fiction and what makes it work. The comment explained, in part, why 90% of my stories got to be about ten thousand words long, become a tangled mass of spaghetti and solipsism, and were left for dead by the side of the road.
My next story, Numbers, was widely considered to have a couple of scenes. This pissed me off, since I’d explicitly written the fucking thing to include scenes galore. I got argumentative about that one, but of course Caren, Eden, and the other scene-nazis were right. My scene ninjitsu was still weak.
I kept trying. I got better at scenes. I got better at thinking in scenes. Little by little I developed the capacity to manipulate the larger structure of stories. This capacity is something I had always lacked – I could as soon plan the shape of a story as a trip to the moon, and with just as much success on the occasions when I _did_ make the attempt.
I hate golf, but I read once that when Tiger Woods was midway into his career he took a bunch of time off and re-engineered his swing from the ground up. I’m no Tiger Woods, obviously, but in terms of words written I’m well into my career. Thinking differently is hard; going back to the beginning is hard. But sometimes that’s what it takes.
For the last four days, until today, I’ve been writing a story every day. They’re short – under a thousand words apiece, which some people think is the wrong direction, since nobody reads short stories, really, and there’s little market for them. But for me it’s exactly the right direction. For me it’s getting the fundamentals in order, getting my head straight, so that when I graduate from baby steps for the second time I can go further, faster.
“I want to go further, faster.” That’s what I said in my Clarion application. Mission fucking accomplished, for once.
*
The other legacy of CW2008 has been to depress the fuck out of me. Granted, recent circumstances have offered ample opportunity for depression, but the CW-specific depression is the full awareness of how much better life can be than what it is.
I miss being surrounded by people who are, in the important ways, fundamentally like me. I didn’t realize how utterly I had lacked this kind of company; how lonely and isolated I had felt since practically forever. To go from three years of _nothing_ in LA to six weeks of full immersion with people who got the jokes, got the references, got the obsessions and the hunger –
and now it’s all gone again, gone for all of us, and we’re left with the task of trying to build something comparable, something just a little bit adequate in a Real World which doesn’t permit us to live together in a magical compound where we’re fed and carted to one party after another and surrounded by a community that respects us for who we are and for what we want to be. We were shown, graphically, what’s possible when conditions are perfect. But conditions will never again be perfect; and charting a course through those imperfections is the job that remains.
So one year out, and trying to put one foot in front of the other, trying to keep both feet pointed to somewhere worth going.