Dignity oh dignity, where for art thou my dignity?

While having nearly anonymous sex in my hotel room, I remembered reading a Brett Easton Ellis novel, Imperial Bedrooms, and reflected that it was appropriate for the kind of day I had, was having, and how it would surely end.



The story is about a jaded, disillusioned screenwriter with a terrible personality with a penchant for terrible behavior: booze, booze and more booze, using and abusing his ‘power’ as a screenwriter to dangle the prospect of acting jobs over the newly rhinoplastied noses of hot, young wannabes, using sex as a means of power, divulging in shit-sticky fantasies with bursts of violence.

But what struck me the most was the final paragraph: in so much, the character was reflecting that he’s a ghost of a person, a mere shell, that felt nothing despite acting to the contrary, that he was alone with his rotten desires and heavy conscience and there was no exit. The final line went something like, ‘I’ve never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.’ Holy groundbreaking shit.

Despite the novel sounding like an extension of Patrick/ Sean Bateman’s story, I felt it ring true.

How jaded I’d become with marriage, my wife, my middle-aged life at the end of my twenties, and felt I couldn’t stay in her house any longer (what with the noise, the terrible, prison-like nonstop sounds of sharp dog barks and rooster crows) and checked myself into a hotel to spend the time in peace, in quiet, away from all the noise, and to allow myself an opportunity to fuck a young girl.

The previous day, I was walking around the mall, and on my way to get a taxi, a hot young thing with her hair-lipped friend started chatting me up. I gave her my email, and hoped to god we’d be able to hook up though I didn’t want to really get my hopes up.

While my wife did her homework, I chatted with the girl online, lying that I was staying at such and such hotel, and that I would only be in town a few more days.

The next night, we were together. We met in the hotel lobby, me: drinking white Russians, her: something with vodka in it, I don’t really know. Conversation was limited: her texting on her phone, me: waiting to proposition her for a fuck. And then it happened: me never being so smooth or suave, was suddenly smooth and suave, and didn’t trip over my words, and suggested it outright and she agreed and we went upstairs the whole while I’m looking at her tight ass in those purple jeans and her low cut shirt and me feeling a little let down because it looked like she didn’t have any tits. But her face was amazing. A slightly flat, but upturned nose, deliciously shaped feminine eyes and the smoothest, unblemished skin. And dark, dark, long hair. Truth be told, when we met outside while waiting for a taxi, I got an instant erection.

I spent a lot of time eating her out. It was so tight, tasted so fresh, so clean I just wanted to tongue fuck her for days. The happiness of her taste added to my delight that when she took off her shirt, her bra, her tits were gigantic for a little girl. Gigantic, and real. And this made me wish I hadn’t wasted a good fuck on a prostitute the hours before. Did I forget to mention that? Well, she was really unmentionable, but it took the energy out of me.

When I could finally raise up and fuck her, she gripped my head and stared deeply and intensely into my eyes like we were going to be newfound lovers. What did it matter? I was leaving the next day.

So we slept afterwards. She wearing my tshirt. And I kept waking up every few hours, would turn over towards her, and she would turn away to the other side. Had I been snoring? Had she woken me up because I was disturbing her sleep?

I didn’t order breakfast in the morning; I made up some story how I was going to visit a friend after I went to the gym. She got the hint, took a shower, brushed her teeth (the hotel supplied an extra one) got her sweet little self all fresh as a daisy despite wearing the same clothes as the night before. I gave her some money for a cab ride home.



And that was that. I exercised, ate a nice breakfast and had a massage and got drunk and took a nap before my wife came over later that night. We ate at a restaurant and she was talking to me about relationships (in general) and how it was best that couples should miss each other, it kept everything fresh and exciting. And I remembered agreeing with her, but thinking of that day before, how it started and what I’d done. And how cool I was with lying and acting and feeling somewhat disturbed but not to the point of being driven to confession. How simple it was, really, to have two different lives.

A Specter Approaches

My mind is a rambling mess – where one thought is spoken, another interrupts it, and one thread starts and then flies off into another thread – where did I put my glasses? What was I talking about? 

Let’s talk about stress. I’ve wanted to be a published author for the last 9 years. I’ve been writing steadily since. I’ve written my share of short-fiction, but mostly I concentrate on novels which are fucking time consuming. It took me four years to write my first novel, and it was only 55,000 words! I got rejected 27 times, and have since let it gather dust on the bookshelf in my brain. I completed an 80,000 word novel, but since it still needs some editing (and I’m not entirely in love with the work since it was written in 2007...I was a different person then) though never queried it to an agent/ publisher. Other works I’ve finished, but likewise never sent off.

I finished a 55,000 novel about a kid who visits Montreal to learn how to accept himself, his personality, his place in society. So far 6 rejections.

I am a scared little bitch to get rejected another 55 times like that writer of The Help.

Last night (as I so often ask myself, but this time I couldn’t get an answer that made me feel better): why the fuck am I spending loads of time writing when I haven’t gotten published?

I am a loner; I am a loser – I accept that. But for godsakes, there would be some saving grace to all this work had I been recognized by somebody, for some of my words, by now.

Am I insane? Yes, but for other reasons than spending so many hours writing.

Vanity publishing seems the way to go. Why not stroke my own fucking ego? Is that what I’m really looking for?

Should I be concerned with the endgame of publishing? No. Not at all, but I can’t come to terms with that.

By now, I feel my work is akin to a stumbling homeless man suffering from schizophrenia, comes across an empty well in his countryside travels, stops, looks down and sees the blackness and thinks of nothing coherent or sensible to do than yell his tired old lungs out into the abyss.

Ghost of Id Deceased

Is it so bad, after drinking Wild Turkey in my spacious hotel room, to see on the wall the bust of Hunter Thompson? What awfulness have I done to be accosted by this ghost...the Ghost of Id Deceased?

A dissociative kind of day spurred this terrible vision.  

I love/ hate this place. Something torques my lust past the depraved into a strange new territory: I cannot call it ‘depraved’ as it is more than. I am afraid to categorize it specifically, or else it will give me a new line, a new boundary of a new territory, that I might transgress and fall deeper into a stranger state.

Something makes me want to consume all that can be coerced. Perhaps I have that same desire elsewhere, in other cities, but most prevalent here, and other cities much like it. A Sodom and Gomorrah, though, without the drugs.

Shameless hussies abound. All it takes is a little smile, a little warmth, a little massage of ego (for her, not for me) and they’re in your pocket. Though, what kind of prize is that to have won? It's like a single ticket bought, a single shot sunk, and you've got ur fuzzy little teddy bear.

When the surface is completely appealing: teeny-tiny with a nice pair of tits, one wouldn’t think would be humanly possible with the absence of fat on her tiny frame. I’d thought they were implants. Thankfully, not so. A nymphet-type-of-face with curly-curly eyelashes, pert nose with a wonderful curve that mimicked her breasts, beautiful, unblemished skin I wanted to kiss for days. How my eyes lusted after this girl, but found the physical act fell short, very, very short.

Perhaps there’s something to be said about a girl who’s not ready to give her body willy-nilly full-tilt to a stranger. I don’t know what that could be? Though if I could guess, it would be she’s shy (we are strangers) probably her pussy smells and tastes funny (what pussy doesn’t?) she’s out-of-tune to my body’s rhythm, and is not ready to let me lead her through the dance (age will do that to a girl.)

And when we kissed with lips, soft little pecks that felt defensive, like she was delaying mingling her tongue with mine.

‘Give me that tongue,’ I said.

She did. But protruded it like a finger: rigid, but curved at the end. There was no wiggle. There was no undulation. There was no dance with mine.

A tongue is only for penetrating asses or pussies. When it is encountered by another tongue, well then, the passion’s got to come through: softness, eveness, aggression may thrive but a different type of aggression than one reserved for a strap-on. No – the tongue should be a lovely instrument. ‘Lick’ can only be applied to that beautifully moist appendage. And she fucking failed.

‘You don’t know how to kiss, darling,’ I told her. ‘Nobody taught you how?’

She admitted, ‘No.’

A short lesson followed; unresponsive, unwilling or just too goddamned shy at her sexlessness being exposed, she was not a fast learner.

Desire seeped out of me. Diddling was all that was left. Mechanically, we rocketed back and forth, her gripping my head and staring intensely into my eyes (no smile from her) like she was really hanging onto a rocket speeding toward the moon.

I was shocked by this girl. Beautiful girls can get by without having a personality by their look. They don’t have to make meaningful small-talk. They don’t need to know what the variables mean in E=mc^2; all that’s necessary is a few grunts (at best a few questions and nod of her head, appearing interested) and a bat of her lovely eyes, a smile – an allknowing smile that betrayed the reality.

Cumming was not absent, but for me, emotion was not there. After we cleaned up, I kicked her out, saying I had some kind of bizarre appointment, talking fast and mumbling so she wouldn’t be able to understand (her being too shy to really press me for explanation).

The madness had started: I broke out the Wild Turkey and chugged it from the bottle while I trashed the hotel room. I ripped the bedsheets off and wrapped them around my body, purposely looking like a perverted version of a muslim pilgrim on his way to Mecca. With bottle in hand, making sure to display the label of the drink, sunglasses on and my dick poking out of a separation of the sheets took my picture. I then proceeded to post the picture on craigslist with my hotel room number: no responses...yet. And so getting drunker, and bored with self-pics, I turned the pages of the phone book and prank called every single Osmena surname asking if they had any daughters over 18 and wanted to marry a white American. Sadly, only ‘nos’ or they just hungup the phone. My fantasy of getting in with the Osmena clan would have to be achieved in a different manner, though, I could not achieve a foot in the door in that moment.

I admired the skyline, grew horny (also from the fantasy of fucking an all powerful Osmena), and masturbated standing up framed in the window, my strokes visible for all to see.

I felt more passion for myself and the view given then for that sweet, sassy, sexually uneducated tart: how dare I be so selfish? Maybe this emotion shouldn’t be analyzed too heavily.

So I collapsed on the naked bed and continued to drink. I looked at the wall, and there he was, The Ghost of Id Past, wearing his t-shades and green Vegas visor, cigarette holder holding a smoldering cigarette. He spoke, but his voice was vocalized inside my head.

I won’t repeat what he told me, it’s all too personal. The words so beautiful, they will be a poem taken to my grave. Instead, I will have to paraphrase: he explained weirdness as a virtue, being the black sheep of a family is really colored dark grey or brown, however you look at it, Id should be let out of its cage frequently if not allowed to control the reins permanently.

The Ghost of Id Deceased faded. I felt terribly uplifted, because I know what kind of price unleashing the beast from its cage and attempting to round it up again exacts. Letting it loose and knowing it’s locked up inside you is just as detrimental – there is no escape. 

Impressions of a City

Strange sensations on this humid night: a typhoon has hit northern Manila. Many seaside homes demolished, squatters (probably) swept away and amongst those 12 dead. Death and destruction in the form of a wet and wild and horrendous ride. Can you drown without going into the ocean? Imagine: a splattering of rain, so thick, so strong, like the ether has switched into the water element, drenching you without warning and infusing your mouth and nostrils with violent thrusts, all while you are swept by the rising tides, the hellwater that done riseth forth like some Biblical description, carried, gone, drowned before you even get to the sea.

It fucking pains me to know the government (after last year’s devastating Manila typhoon and subsequent floodings...and the devastation of floods and rains years previously) does not put into place obstructions to Mother Nature’s madness. Supposedly they can’t: the squatters take up shitloads of land skirting around the water in some barangays, and the government would rather let these disenfranchised people squat than legitimize their existence with government health, educational, and work programs. What kind of shiesty lot has risen to power here? Here, in the Philippines?

I find a lot lacking in this city: infrastructure is at a bare minimum. The roads are as pockmarked with potholes as a teenage kid with acne; the traffic congestion is constant, what with the 10,000 jeepneys in Cebu it’s no fucking wonder; the pollution is so choked in natural riverways under the bridges that it looks like it was really the site of a 7/11 that was bombed to shit and all the plastic bottles and candy wrappers and other knickknacks are the only last artifacts that remain; not to mention the noise pollution (people don’t give a shit if they’re listening to music or letting their dog bark all hours of the night, or even as simple as your neighbors not realizing that a door can be shut and let their shitmachine toddler wail it’s poor lungs out, all while others try to sleep...me you ding bats!).

I get it – this is a 3^rd world country. But jesus fucking Christ people, your goddamned GDP is expanding! Clean up your fucking act so you can attract some foreign investment.

This place is oppressive (Cebu City). I am not painting the Philippines in a broad stroke here, I am describing what I see on a daily basis.

There is this constant fear when walking about the streets: you see it in the people’s faces as they make eye-contact with you. They are stripping you down of your humanity, they see you as a walking dollar sign. And the girls! I have never been more eyefucked before in my entire life. As an introvert and lover of women, I had always thought that if I were a woman, I would not want to be eyefucked. For reasons being, I could empathize with the imagined woman thinking just how detestable, no matter how attractive that person is that’s eyefucking you, and fearful it is to be stripped to the bone and made vulnerable just with a single look. It’s a mindfuck; and I’m happy to say my hypothesis has rung correct, for myself. Most guys love it – but the ones that do are the type that do the eyefucking in their home countries, if you catch my drift. What’s wonderful, is that I am a handsome white man, but a poor white man. When the girls eyefuck me, I can read their minds like an opened, annotated guide to their clitoris and other lust-hungry erogenous areas (lust for money included). They see white: they think ca-fucking-ching! But if they only knew, my company pays for one roundtrip ticket per year to my country of residence. It just so happens to be the Philippines because that’s where my wife’s in school.

I visit because she’s home to me. Not this rathole of a city. The problems are glaring, and I can imagine how the locals feel: beaten down by the government because of scandals and corruption and misappropriation of the good people’s taxes. This place is a shithole, it’s always going to be a shithole, because the place is overrun with corrupt rats, why even attempt a change for the better when you’ll just be robbed continuously.

It’s sad to see how infected this place (and country) has become by the really shitbaggage of Western countries. Hardwork is out the window. Education has taken a back seat by the chance for a quick buck or better, win the lottery (marrying a rich old white guy included). Everything longlasting has been replaced by everything only as good as the next moment. Yes this is an Asian country, and yes they do respect their elders quite a bit. But respect goes out the window, for me, when my parents-in-law sent my wife to Korea to earn money, and once they did so, quit their jobs and expected her to remit money every month. And they were fucking 40 and 41 (respectively) at the time! Just one incident, but it’s enough to render my argument coherent enough whenever anyone brings up the idea of respecting one’s elders. If you’re a dirtbag, you’re a dirtbag. End of story.

This rant is nothing more. This is an outpouring, and offended you may be, then all the more effective you’ve rendered me as a writer. That I have expressed an opinion. And not all opinions are good, they are merely a point-of-view. Though, I have to wonder how people can look at this city through rose tinted glasses. What do they see that I’m missing about this place?

And so maybe the government, and the respective people in charge, have their own underlying reasons for not providing adequate shelter to the Filipinos when Mother Nature pukes its rain and rises its tides through the city streets: maybe they’re hoping Mother Nature will clean this place, and other places like it, for them. 

The Great Pterodactyl in the Sky

This great mechanized beast, wrought of steel, stealthily hovers in the sky so high up, but just underneath the realm of space. Silently it waits, and then upon orders from some gruff, stern fellow with a few thousand stars, and rectangles of different shades and hues of colors, decorated with the flair of a career well done, mumbles the order into a telephone which is transmitted invisibly, at least to the naked eye, to the Great Pterodactyl hovering in the sky. And then? The mechanical bird craps out a two ton load, sending it falling, falling through the ether until it hits the taqiyah worn on the head of a backwards walking insurgent.

Luck would have it the victim would be an insurgent. From the Great Pterodactyl’s mechanized eye, lens small yet penetrating enough to reveal on the screen to the grim-stern-lipped General the offensively-colored taqiyah. White colored, (though green, blue, orange, red, or the color of burnt napalm) was just the right color to piss off this man. A General yes, but with a morally justified fashion sense. To him, it just didn’t go with the salwar kameez, dark green, masking the insurgent’s portly paunch tolerably enough for him to see it, but ignore it.

‘Looks like a fucking Christmas wreath. Can’t the motherfucker make up his mind? You wear the skullcap of a jew, a dress that’s more befitting of a fifteen year old girl entertaining guests at her quinceanara, and green! Fucking Douglas Fir Green!’ the General said to nobody in particular in the control room of the Great Pterodactyl. ‘Something’s got to be done about this!’ And he did...caused a firestorm with the shit from the great, mechanized beast in the sky.

The control room phone rang, and after the General answered, declared to the scarcely populated with geeks in eye-glasses and wild hair and unshaved from pulling double shift duties (both men and women looked haggard and unshaved...so went the mannish appearance of geeky women, and girlish, nearly transvestite-overcompensation-for-ultra-femininity of the geeky men). They erupted with satisfaction; finally, there was a goddamned reason for them monitoring all those Great Pterodactyls circling in the sky.

‘Fuck yeah!’ bellowed the Herculean females.

‘Oh, huzzah!’ squealed the princesses with delight.

Then the General remained on the phone, listening to the intelligence report about the direct hit. The following is what he heard from a soldier on the ground, investigating the crater as big as Rhode Island.

 

‘Sir, with all rationality, I have to commend you on a splendid job. That fucking skullcap was a fucking eyesore. But in all seriousness, sir, that was the son-of-a-bitch who was firing at us yesterday. The same soiled monkey wearing a girl’s dress that we saw come at us with his child brandishing an AK-47, squeezing the little shitmachine until he shot at us...all to defend himself, because, as you are well aware, no military personnel are allowed to fire on a child, even under such extreme circumstances as what we encountered yesterday.’

‘Get to the fucking point!’ the General said through gritted teeth. ‘I want you to describe to me how that slutty little garment rippled and faded when the flames caught.’

The ground soldier said, ‘Wait sir. I have to finish. Today, this same apron-wearing-motherfucker took his wife into his own hands as a lethal weapon, picked her dainty-niqab-wearing ass right on his right shoulder, squeezed whereabouts her uterus would be, and then out shot one, two, three, then ten little babies. At first, all us soldiers thought it was nothing to worry about, until we saw the little newly-created-shitmachines had unpinned grenades shoved in their mouths. The diabolical fuckers...sir!’

‘Indeed, soldier, indeed,’ the general replied, and then hung-up the phone. 

The General had to sit back in his chair and revel in the merriment of the geeks prancing and slamdancing around him, with the image of a giant-fuck-off crater with smoke billowing out of it displayed on the screen from the camera as seen by the Great Pterodactyl in the sky. 

Reigning Shit-Fire from the Great Pterodactyl

Date Night

in response to The One Minute Writer blog writing prompt: Date Night (August 10, 2013)

The little devil inside my head was pounding on the inner walls with such gusto for sure I thought my skull would crack. Prostrate on some stranger’s bed, my pants around my ankles – had I taken my own roofie again? – I could not remember what events had led me to this state.

Was it that tall blond beckoning me at the bar? Or was it that mustachioed leather fanatic mounting his bike as I exited the restaurant? What worried me the most was my ass and cock both hurt. Not a good sign; not clear at all. And then a womanly figure with massive shoulders appeared silhouetted in the bathroom door frame. ‘Ahh...’ I relaxed, until she crept back into bed beside me, whispered in my ear to ‘show me that front side again,’ and then kissed my neck...her morning stubble scraping against my skin. 

The NSA Leaked My Sexual Tastes with Delightful Consequences

First of all: fuck you NSA! I thought NSA meant ‘No Strings Attached!’ but if I really knew that it meant ‘National Security Agency’ I wouldn’t have tried to place the following personal ad on their website:

‘Tall glass-of-water looking to be drunk by anyone with lips. Leather fetishists will be entertained regardless of race. Infantilization a definite plus, though YOU must bring the adult diapers. With or without bonnet is ok. If you can accommodate, I will appreciate.’

And then I get a call from this smug motherfucker Dustin Diamond who used to play Samuel ‘Screech’ Powers on the hit TV show Saved by the Bell. At first I thought I had my first bite on my personal ad and immediately ripped my pants off when he said he worked for NSA.

From fucking loser to American Freedom Fighter! 

Powder looks so stylish in his new 'Freedom Fighter' white wig. People said the black wig didn't bring out the beadiness of his Austrian Gestapo Eyes. 

But then, after he explained why he was calling, I had to ask, ‘What do you mean National Security Agency?’

He was giving me advance warning of how those fuckers were trying to fuck the fucking general population by spying on their senseless, mindless shit they spew on a daily basis via phone and internet.

I said, ‘Why would they give a flying toss about hearing how much Stephanie liked the One Direction group on Facebook?’

Screech told me, ‘I don’t know. But I’m a patriot. I love my country so goddamned much, I have to spread the word to the good American people that they are being spied on.’ He then went on to relate how he and Julian Assange were freedom fighters and compared himself to Che Guevara and that Buddhist monk who set himself on fire.

‘I agree,’ I told him. ‘You’re an honest American, finally spreading the word that Americans are being spied on. At least Facebook isn’t logging our internet traffic to sell to marketing companies.’

We then got to talking about Slater – of course. Screech also said he misses the days when his co-star Zack, played by Mark Paul Gosselling[sic...or however you fucking spell that French-ass name], used to let him watch while he undressed in his changing room. He then burst into tears telling me how much he misses his ‘soulmate.’

‘Whatever, man,’ I said. ‘So you’re not into leather or dressing up like a baby?’ After he said no, I hung up the phone waiting for a sex fiend to call.

Isn't there a seriously creeping likeness between Snowden and Screech? 

But then my wife called from work. She explained that Screech had just called her and, because she’s my wife (legally...spiritually, I’m still attached to that robot sex-machine Vicki from Small Wonder), he had to divulge important information about the No-Strings-Attached Website, which really isn’t about hooking up, and how he had to do his duty to personally call all Americans and spread the word about this unthinkable crime of spying on American’s technological footprint. She would be tracked by the NSA because the callous bitch just wanted to share our last name. He warned her by using me as a prime example, and how my sex ad was being monitored by the (not really) No-Strings-Attached website and would be used to provide relevant Google ads the next time I do another search for leather jockstraps.

My (un)lovely wife said, ‘So........do you like doing babies, or do you like dressing up as them?’ I had never thought about the alternative interpretation. She was not mad, just surprised. I mean, how often do you get a call from Screech? And she was surprised at my strange sexual tastes. 

To that end, Screech and the NSA really kind of liberated my wife and my sexual fantasies: everything was out in the open. My wife agreed to bring home adult diapers for me to wear after work, but only if I promised to let her rape me with a strap-on and call her ‘Duke.’

Fair’s fair. Thank you NSA!

An attempt at brain fisting

To be woken up by a fucking marching band at 4 in the goddamned morning made me think to myself, ‘Cebu city is too fucking noisy, too fucking crowded, and too fucking soiled to be toiled with anymore. Time to move – for fuck’s sake.’

The fascist queers that don't know the importance of a person's circadian rhythm.

What monster fucking scheduled the retarded marching band to play at 4 am on a Saturday morning? What senseless unreasonable rat would do such a thing to all partygoers returning home, head full of drink, and desperately needing sleep? A buffoon, that’s who. Or a teetotaler, finally getting back at all us shitheads for partying until the wee hours. Well, today, my unfunny asshole of a friend, you win. Drinking is bad, m’kay? I get it. And so it’s time to move on from Cebu City.

Thank god I don’t have any property here. The dogs bark, the roosters crow all hours of the fucking day. I thought roosters just screech at daylight – thereby providing the poor farmer with a fucking alarm clock. What kind of rotten, trailer-trash monkeys keep roosters in the fucking city? Goddamned squatters, that’s who.

I should not complain – no. These people are my wife’s people. Her family was a squatter family, in the not too distant past. Is it shameful of me to ridicule the cesspool that is the genepool of these impoverished monkeys, while at the same time as my wife sleeps on my chest? I do not consider my wife of the same ilk, no matter her scumbag mentalities, ie. sleeping like a dead person. (‘Did you hear the marching band this morning?’ I ask. She tells me, ‘What marching band? I didn’t hear it.’)

All these sounds – the carelessness of it all, the inconsideration for your neighbor have me driving mad bonkers around the walls of my apartment, literally lodging my fingers into my eyesockets and desperately trying to tear off my scalp, dig a hole into my skull, rip it wide open and fist my goddamned brain until it mushes up like a bowl of soggy oatmeal. My skull is more resilient than I think – so, I have to put in ear plugs (35 decibel killing strength) and then wear my noise cancelling headphones (+40 decibels, or thereabouts.) And then, even fucking then, with all of that noise cancelling shit, faintly, as I try to wish myself away on a mountaintop that is without any animal or human sound, I can hear the fucking roosters and dogs and the start of a hammer at the construction site outside. What the fuck. The noise – prison would seem quieter. A nonstop barrage of midnight assrapings with flesh smacking against flesh juxtaposed with the wails of either pain or pleasure would be more soothing. I finish writing, and decide to give fisting my brain another try. 

Character and Motivation

A good article presented by Brian Klems of Writer's Digest about knowing characters, but also knowing what your character wants to become; in short, motivation. What do they want?

Characterization

Lately I’ve been getting rejected for reasons other than unoriginality. I feel that I’m not creating lifelike characters, flawed yes, but not without some redeeming qualities for the audience to get behind and rally for.

I don’t mean using gimmicks to create characters: no one should have to read about a retarded dwarf with one leg, one eye and a lisp...unless such physical traits are dire to the character’s character and to the plot itself. However, that is all surface anyways – physical traits. Instead, what needs to be done is to create characters with depth. How the fuck do you do that? It takes time, and energy, and a lot of thought to really understand your characters.

What scares your character? You should know...

What I like best, is of course, start with a character sketch. This gives me a full introduction with all the sorts of bio information that would be common: name, age, height, hometown, etc. The surface points. But then you’d have to delve deeper, slightly deeper at first: Why does your character have one blue eye and one brown? Why does s/he have a permanent limp? The answers to these questions scratch the surface, and start to carve out a backstory (history) that should be presented here in the character sketch and not needlessly on the page of your novel. The one thing I hate to read is backstory that seems to have no place in the novel. Information dumps are a sign the author is providing crucial information in an artless manner. Rather, to avoid this, to make sure each word is pregnant with meaning in your novel, write the backstory in the character sketch. I will get to the point as to why this is important in a minute.

Next, after penetrating the first depth, the first layer of the onion, the surface of a character’s physical traits, and the next, why they have such traits, now comes the tricky part: you must carve out the personality...but in the context of the story. This will provide valuable characterization to help drive the story forward, and make the characters seem more believable as real life people.

For example, in a story I wrote, the main character has a different take on fashion sense that is not accepted in his hometown. When he travels abroad, he finally unleashes his threads and finds that other people accept his fashion sense, even compliment his do’s, but the fashion sense as part of the character’s personality is also part of a plot device: because of the way he dresses, he is mistaken for a celebrity, much to his advantage. That characterization drives the story forward.

I guess that would bring about the discussion of ir/relevance: don’t make your character a retarded midget unless it drives the story. IE it reveals an important part of character that is crucial to the theme/ message. 

The main reason why backstory of the character should be written fully in the character sketch is to provide you, the author, with all the information to make sure each scene with that character and bit of dialogue spoken my him/ her is true to character. What I like to assume in speaking, is that not everyone speaks exactly what they want to say. Speaking is an approximation of thought, and sometimes that articulation can be a bad approximation. By knowing the backstory of your character, you will be full well knowledgeable of how this person thinks, behaves, and therefore speaks in certain situations. Some authors argue they had their characters doing unexpected things. My take on that is, nothing is unexpected if you know your characters. All characters react to situations brought before them. Even if a strange reaction is brought about, it is still your character reacting in his characteristically character-like way. (???) Sorry to pound you with that word over and over.  

When you write your first draft, the words the character wants to say may come out in dialogue: but when you re-read it, you hear the words as being too direct, or in some way, out of line with the character and the context. When you revise, reframe the same ideas communicated in the dialogue but in an approximation. People, just like characters, sometimes make the wrong word choice. This could speak volumes about your character, and how s/he is reacting to the context.

So, in so much, I wanted to confess that characterization is more than just tacking on adjectives to your character, more so than physical traits, more so than backstory. Instead, characterization is knowing all there is to know about your characters and then approximating what s/he says in dialogue (never exactly, or so directly 100% linked from thought to speech) and then having your character reacting to situations (scenes) in which s/he is involved in.

If you just remain on the surface, your characters will remain cardboard cutouts, and therefore only vehicles to tell the story. Melodrama is cardboard – dimensionless, surface only – drama is depth. Think hard and long about this aspect. 

Revamped (with Inspiration Now?)

Read an interesting book (Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the scenes of a creative revolution) about the 3^rd Golden Age of Television which featured the showrunners of David (Milch, Simon, Chase), Matt Weiner and Vince Gilligan who are the auteurs of The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, respectively.

What I liked best was how these showrunners developed episodes (and thereby entire seasons) in the writing room. Though, each with a different style of managing his writers (damn near fascist some of them, catty – of course – and one, altogether laid back and open to letting writers manage themselves) they all agreed on one thing to help them really explore the story and penetrate its depths and bring to light the wonderfulness of emotional complexity: collaboration.

I don’t know if I agree. Yet, I am a writer of a different genre altogether. TV should be collaborative – after all, you need to produce amazingness at a breakneck pace. How else can you carve out a masterpiece unless you’ve got 5 or 6 heads working on it?

But novels are novels (ie different). Would Tolstoy be the same if he collaborated? Dostoyevsky? Yes, editors aside, novelists have sole ownership of their work. Their vision on the page (as selfish as it sounds).

I am not against collaboration, but I am against someone who I may be collaborating with to try and ‘write me out,’ or push my ideas aside and let theirs shine through. I am a non-confrontational type of person: I won’t fight. Instead, I’ll pick my fucking ball up and go the fuck home and write my own fucking novel. Suffice it to say: go fuck yourself.

But – you scoundrel – my psyche comments: readers provide good feedback to writers to help improve their works.

That’s why I’m torn. Even working solely on novels, you still require the feedback of others. Dare say, I think that’s collaboration. I guess the novelist should surround him/herself with good people who provide valuable feedback. Would those TV shows create such depth if the writers involved were not as good as their fellows? No, the writer room would be a fucking yahoo forum.