Vanderbrew

As I’m currently listening to Bag of Bones I’ve been thinking more about Stephen King’s writing and writing in general. It’s my opinion that Stephen King is a much better writer than many people give him credit for. Amber she suggested that it could be due to his particular subject matter and that makes sense, but I think that many people are missing out if they’re avoiding him for that reason.

Bag of Bones is a scary book at times and I find that it definitely keeps me on the edge of my proverbial seat but the writing is really, really good. I think that part of what makes his writing so enjoyable for me is the shear panorama of his imagery. I’ve done a lot of reading in my life and often when I’m reading something I know what an author will say before I read it because it’s just a common phrase. Not common enough to be trite or banal, but I’ve seen it before, or I’ve thought of it and I just kind of stay on the tracks of the book, gliding along while my mind smacks mindlessly on a piece of gum. With King however, I find that I’ll be reading (or listening) along and he won’t paint the picture how I expect him to. He zigs when many others would have zagged. I take a moment and the picture unfolds in my mind in a new and unexpected manner. This makes the story more real and keeps me more involved in it at the front of my mind rather than shuffling it along to the back while I think about other things.

Another thing about King (though it might be more this particular book than the author in general) is that he makes me want to write. It may be because he crafts something special but attainable. Yes, he’s a good writer. No, he’s not Faulkner, but he’s good. I can read what he writes, and grasp it, and aspire to it. It’s not so plain that there’s no pull and it’s not so vaunted that it’s completely out of my reach.

So, I’ve been exchanging emails with Ernie today and one of the things I sent him was a link to a short story I wrote back in 2003. I haven’t read it for a number of years and I read back over part of it today after I sent the link out. While I was reading it, I realized something - I’m a good writer.

Now, I know that that doesn’t exactly sound modest and I may be a bit biased, but really, I think I’m quite good at it. I completely recognize that the story was mostly a first draft and definitely requires some polish, but the nuts and bolts are there and, if anything, I think I’m a better writer now than I was 4 years ago. Moreover, reading some stuff I’ve written makes me want to write more.

So, now that I’ve got you all pumped up and interested (neat trick, huh ;-)) here’s the short story I wrote:
Joes’s Short Life

PS - Please ignore the gratuitous panhandling after the story. I can’t find the original document to republish the PDF and I’m a different person today with different goals and aspirations.

PPS - Thanks, Ernie, for re-awakening this.

So, as you probably noticed, my creative writing on the site has fallen off quite a bit lately. It seems that I can focus on creative writing or I can focus on coding, but I’m not so good at doing both at the same time.

I’m going to be focusing on coding for the foreseeable future because that’s where I want to allocate my time right now. I’ve got a big unfinished project in that arena and it’s time to make some progress on it, hopefully contributing back to the community as I go.

I hope to return to more consistent writing in the future and I’m sure that I’ll have the occasional line here and there but I don’t think that there will be very many for a few months. I’ve created a Creativity feed and if you’re just visiting for the writing I encourage you to simply track that with your feed aggregator.

I follow Elizabeth Bear’s blog and she had a really interesting post recently. I’m fascinated by the distinction between a character being acted upon by the story and a character being in control of themselves in the story. The idea that just changing a few words can give the power back to your character, make them stronger and make the story more engaging seems almost like magic to me.

I think that this is one of the reasons that I’m so interested in writing. Anyone can throw down some words and call it a story - I don’t think that there’s much skill required to just put words to paper and string a narrative together. It’s the quality of the narrative and its holding power where the magic lays.

The correct words evoke a vision.

The better words evoke a feeling.

The best words put you in the story.

A death and a life. Not a new life. An old life. A worn out life. A life redeemed by blood and made anew. A life given purpose. A purpose to replace apathy. Apathy worn like a comfortable old coat. How did I reach this place? Where did the apathy come from? How was this life recovered? It begins with a death.

My garden is not a peaceful, idyllic place where plants grow freely and produce bountiful herbs and vegetables for us to eat - it is a place where war is waged against a relentless and seemingly limitless foe. It is not a modern war fought from afar with chemicals or flame or hired mercenaries. It is an old war, fought hand to slime, one foe at a time. A war where traps are laid to ensnare the unwary, where captured foes are shown no mercy but are drowned in cups of beer and where the dead bodies of my foes will decompose in the compost bin, destined to fertilize the plants that they sought to consume. It was not I who began this war. I would rather it not be necessary at all. I am willing to sacrifice a few leaves here and there to keep the environment stable. However, I am not willing to sit back and watch while my entire crop is consumed, root, stem, leaf and fruit.

—

It began, as most things do, with a seed. Not a metaphorical seed, but a physical one. I planted turnips and onions, beets and parsely, lettuce and radishes. One morning, the turnips were all but gone. Almost every leaf eaten away and only the veins remaining, like a skeleton showing the shape of what was once a vibrant seedling.

“Curse those pests, I should do something about them.”

Ah, but the folly of the procrastinator. I’d like to think that it was generosity that stayed my hand.

“Well, maybe they just needed to make up a bit of a shortfall. It’s been pretty rainy lately and there’s probably a large population.”

I let things slide. I did some reading, but the best solution for dealing with slugs was manual. Pick them off and dispose of them. This was a distasteful solution so I continued to ignore the situation. I checked on the seedlings frequently. I fretted over the daily losses.

“Hmm…It looks like the turnips might be able to make a comeback. I think I see some new leaves. Oh, dear, weren’t there more beets than this yesterday? Speaking of yesterday, where are the parsley shoots that were coming up?”

One day, I realized. Everything was gone except for the lettuce mix and the ragged radishes who’s leaves looked like the tattered clothing of people trying to survive on the edge of everything and I realized. The beans and peas were chewed and chewed, some with an airy vein structure where there should have been a leaf and others with naught but a stump for a stem and I realized. This was not a garden, this was a war.

And yet, I did little. I made a brief attempt at fighting back. I went out at night, flashlight in hand and picked off the slugs and snails that I found, placing them in a bucket of water. I hoped that they’d drown, but they simply crawled out. I spent time pushing them back in with a stick, thinking maybe they just needed more time to succumb. Soon, very few were still moving so I put the bucket aside and retired to bed. In the morning, the bucket held almost no slugs. They had seemingly escaped after I left.

“Oh, well, I put the bucket down in a different part of the yard, maybe they won’t be back to bother the beans that I planted recently.”

Then, I planted the tomato seedlings that had been growing under lights in the garage. The next day there were a few holes in the leaves but it was nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

Soon after, I planted the basil, which had also been growing under lights. I checked the basil in the night after I’d planted it. Three hours after I’d planted it. Five plants. All showed damage. One was swarming with earwigs and had had two leaves eaten away. This was the straw. The camel’s back was broken. They had gone after the basil.

You have to understand, I love pesto. I have tried more than a few different recipes to find the one that I consider the best. I grow my own basil just so that I can make this pesto. Thinking of some bug eating my basil and preventing me from enjoying the pesto in the future aroused an ire in me that little else I’d seen in the garden had. It was now time to fight back.

Fight back I have. Picking snails and slugs from the ground and from leaves. Drowning them in a cup of beer. Laying traps for earwigs and ambushing slugs with man-made shelters that will be easy to find and remove. I think that it’s working. The population is dwindling. Only time will tell, but I’m well on my way towards winning this war.

—

Let this be a lesson to all bugs everywhere onions, parsley, turnips, beets, it’s ok. I can withstand the loss. But, when you touch my basil, you cross a line. You perform an action with grave consequences and I will not relent in any way. I will not hold back. I will carry the fight to you, to your home, to your family. I will not stop until my garden is allowed to flourish with only the minor blemishes that are expected from a balanced ecosystem.

When you begin, you have a blank canvas. The story can go anywhere. There is no history to adhere to. The future is limitless. This isn’t always easy because sometimes there are too many paths and you can’t figure out which one to take or there’s a lot of fog and you can’t even find a single path, but generally it’s easy to start the boulder rolling down the hill.

Great! A start! Now what? Everything after the start takes a lot more work. Now that you’ve captured the reader’s attention, you need to hold it. You need to write in a captivating manner, keeping the story moving forward, keeping them involved, keeping the characters believable. This is where it starts to get hard.

I think I’m good at startings. That’s what I’ve been practicing, but I don’t think I’m as good with the rest. I’ve written one short story which I’m proud of, but wasn’t particularly good (yes, those two thoughts are compatible). I enjoy writing poetry because it’s complete even when it is short and I can tie it off soon after I’ve started, the momentum carries me through and I end up with something decent. Stories however, are hard work.

I’d like to write a good one. I’d like to just push through it but I think maybe I’m afraid of it. Hmm…I don’t think that it’s fear, but I’m not sure what it is. A dearth of diligence? A paucity of commitment? Some deep seated character flaw which makes it easy for me to start things but difficult to finish them? I don’t know.

I suspect that it’s a mix of things. I do know that I have trouble finishing things. Maybe it’s the sense of approaching ending? Maybe it’s the fear of releasing a creation into the wild uncertainty of public opinion which may shower it (and me) with ridicule and disparaging remarks? Maybe it’s just a general lack of stick-to-it-ive-ness? Who knows.

Anyone else feel this way? I can’t (don’t want to?) believe that I’m alone in this so feel free to chime in with your thoughts.

It is very difficult to write a coherent interesting anything when you’re looking at a blank page and are listening to music but the music is good and I’m into it and I had an interesting thought earlier today about creation - I mean the act of creation, not, you know, Creation. There’s a lot of very talented people in the world and I’m often very impressed by things that I read or listen to because I look at what they’ve done and think to myself, man how could I ever create this? I listen to music almost continuously while I work and I want to be able to create something as powerful and thought provoking as some of the songs I’ve been listening to lately, I guess that that’s part of the reason that I’ve started writing more lately - it’s a way to try to bring that forth because you never get better unless you practice and I want to practice more but it’s difficult to gather the energy and material to be creative at the end of the day when you’ve already spent a lot of brain juice working and creating clever solutions to fool the computer into doing what you want so sometimes it’s easier to just write in stream of consciousness because there’s a sort of lessening of expectations when you’re doing stream of consciousness and it doesn’t really need to make sense as long as it flows and it doesn’t really need to be profound unless your Faulkner and have the skill and dedication to really make something incredible and carry it on for pages and pages leaving your readers wondering where it ends but I really don’t think I need to hold myself up to that same candle and yes I do know about both punctuation and line breaks but I don’t want to use them so please just go with me here while I continue to explore this interesting writing technique which could very easily be abused but I think that I’m actually carrying it off quite well while I swing very wide of my original topic but isn’t that the greatest thing of stream of consciousness because you’re just streaming and writing what comes and it can meander and fork and return and twist and turn and loop-de-loop and it doesn’t matter as long as you’re doing it convincingly and I really hope that I am and am very impressed if you’ve stayed with me this long and think that you really deserve a reward of some sort so I’ll stop.

Many books have a page of quotes which are pertinent to their story. I’ve always been impressed by author’s ability to pick out quotes that sound cool and fit in well with what they’re doing. While I don’t yet have a story to put quotes in front of, I’ve got a quote that’s been kicking around in my head and I think that it’s really cool.

“Sad to see a man’s faith fail.” Kurt Barlow, Salem’s Lot

I don’t know what story would follow that (other than the original) but it just seems like a cool line - especially if you’re familiar with the story that it comes from. I’d probably have to get permission from Mr. King before I could use it, but dang, it’d be cool.

Jared was 10 when his parents sold him. His father made excuses about how they just couldn’t afford to support two children while his mother squeezed out a few tears. He knew that deep inside they were glad that he was leaving because even deeper inside, they were afraid of him.

His master was a skeletal man named Sharad. He took Jared to a large house in the town of Humil. Jared was assigned to a small, windowless room with four boys and three beds in it. He put his extra shirt down and was taken to get his mark of ownership.

When he came back, there were four beds and no sign of his shirt. No one said anything. Jared looked at the other boys. They all appeared about the same age as him and none of them looked particularly well cared for. All were marked by bruises, old and new, as well as cuts, scratches and scabs. The smallest boy had a bandage over one ear.

Jared moved toward a bed but his way was blocked by one of the boys. He tried again and again he was obstructed. After trying twice more, he picked a spot on the floor and curled up there. He knew that he would appear weak but he didn’t care. As much as he hated himself for it, he missed his parents. He missed his house. He missed his bed. He knew that he would find his place here and he knew that he would rise quickly but tonight he just game himself to his feelings.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t move. He gave no outward signs of how he felt. Jared knew that if he showed that sort of weakness, the others would be that much harder on him. He simply lay there, feeling sad, letting the emotions run their course and drain out of him. Tomorrow would be a new day. Tomorrow it would begin.