Thursday 5/9/24
Normally what happens with a prose off is we have a single entry containing bad work by a bad writer pitted against work of mine. Bad writing isn't intentionally searched for--it's just what's out there. In all of these places. It wouldn't make as much sense, would it, if there was great work being written and published and instead then focusing on the worst of it in these prose offs? Of course not. A big part of the point is here's the system, here's what you get every damn time from all of these other people, no exceptions, save with this one guy, who those other people want dead.
But I thought, you know, we really should honor someone who is a master of writing. Like Halimah Marcus who, again, is an official master of fiction. So I figured that that great master should have her own entry on here with her writing, and it wouldn't do to sully said entry with the writing from the likes of me. Non-master.
You still want the coach to call your number, though, so you can take your shift on the ice, do you know what I mean? You're hoping to go over the boards. Then I thought, right, best of both worlds. We can honor an obvious and official master of fiction like Halimah Marcus, and we can do what I'll call a hopscotch--and calm down, system people frauds, it's not a Julio Cortazar reference--prose off, where we just have to jump back in time to an earlier entry on here from what we'll call Team A. The A-Team. Team Master. So let's do this. Ready? Hop back to that masterful prose about the literary party--so exciting and relatable--from Halimah Marcus, and then indulge this non-master in having a go with something he just wrote.
It's just one paragraph, but it's a fairly long paragraph. In this story--which is called "Go and Come Back"--a man has entered the room of his thirteen-year-old daughter who has had a bad thing happen to her. Really two bad things. Actually, more like three. Different kinds of things, from different parts of life. In different stages of happening.
It's one paragraph for a number of reasons. Everything you do in a work of writing is for reasons, if you are creating works of real value. It's not whim. It's not because that's all you could get out. You're making constant choices. Then you're putting specific things in motion. But everything is a decision done for reasons.
The guy comes into the room. It's late at night. The girl has also seen something--probably--she shouldn't have seen. That was not meant for her seeing, certainly. She's in her bed, with her back to the man. The light is on. He sits on the edge of the bed. When we sit with someone who has their back to us, time can be different than if they were facing us. We feel like we have more time. Technical time, of course, isn't actually different, but there's a lot of play to time, and to internal time. How we might sense time. Interpret time. Utilize time. When eyes are not on us, time may feel differently. Slower. Or that we have more of it. We're less rushed. We might not feel as much pressure. We may think we have a better opportunity to gather ourselves, marshal our thoughts. Find that which we wish to say. Do stock taking. It's still the same three seconds though, you know? But it's also not.
He's going to think some things. This paragraph has to move downhill. It can't tarry. There can be no going in circles, no need given for a reader to double back, no digression. If there are qualifiers, they must be executed crisply as part of that flow. The paragraph can have its length, but it must not feel like it's taking a long time. That would be unrealistic, which would take us out of the story. The language must not be overtly poetic; it can be more poetic than poetry, but it can't be attention-calling as something poeticized. It has to be something, not be that thing, and be more than that thing, as part of a natural order, within the natural world of a story. When I say that a reader must never feel like they're reading, this is part of what I'm talking about. You don't want them consciously saying, "Oh, that's a literary device," or "They're trying to do this poetic imagery." If a reader is doing that, you've made it so that the reader is less able to be fully present. It is when we are fully present that we have life experiences of the greatest significance. Or when we allow them to have us, you could say. If this paragraph were to be made into several paragraphs, physical distance would be created within the story. A geographical distance. it has to all be on the same side of the street, in the same spot. Not down the street, too. Not across the street as well. And a set of temporal distances. It would be less, "Right here, right now," and more like, "Some here, some there, then some later on."
People think writing is the black parts--the letters, the words. But writing is just as much about the white spaces, what a painter would call negative space. You are putting things in those spaces on account of what has been black elsewhere. White spaces can be like split atoms. All of this energy and power inside of a centimeter. You can say as much with the white as you do with the black. You have to. Why wouldn't you? Some parts of the page matter more than others? That's not true. You have to not only use all of it, but max out with all of it. I'm able to write a 400 word story that contains worlds, because of what I do with the white space. That white space will say volumes, because of what the black parts do and don't. What the black makes come out of the white. There is no end to the possibilities of white space, if you know what you're doing. And the same with the black parts. How they work together.
Now if I were to break up this paragraph, I'd be creating in you, the reader, a sensation of more time passing. More time than is actually dramatically passing. You'd be being misled. But that paragraph must go about its business with no mucking about. Important things also have to happen within it. Of a weighty nature of great depth. Put clearly. Everyone is meant to relate and identify, while at the same time, we're getting something intensely personal from one person, while getting into truths that have marked the whole of humanity since the start. That's the thing right there. That's what is in none of these awful stories by these awful writers. That movement from the personal to the universal. Back again, if you like.
But everything is done for reasons. Do you see what I'm saying? Everything is a decision of consequence. Everything has stakes. Ready? Here we go:
“You doing okay?” he asked, like nothing had happened, or at least nothing new. Kids grow up fast, he thought, in the ways of the world, and then realized that a trope will never do the work when it’s reality that is really on the clock. He felt selfish and evasive within himself, as if crouching behind a shield. There but not there. This is not how he wanted to parent. How he wished to be present. To give what was probably impossible to give so that its knowledge would be fully received. A communication, a reassurance, a gesture, the saying of a magic spell, a waving of the hand that…what? This, too, would pass? He didn’t officially know, as per the system employed by his wife and himself, what the “this” was, mooting direct comment on the subject, and neither did he like that “too,” as in, “One more thing that grinds us down and then climbs atop a pile of other such things, stripped of their names and commented on no further, because there have been so many.” That was a most misleading and unproductive “too.” And just remarking that pain was fleeting would necessarily sound flippant. He thought again about how much he loved the three of them. They who were there. How they were in relation to each other. He could say something general about boys so that he wouldn’t be betraying a specific confidence that had already been betrayed. Sort of. That they were the worst. Some of the better ones will try to get a lot more correct than the rest, but they will still falter. They’ll rise and then they’ll stumble. Two steps up, three down with a clattering. They’ll need help standing again. And who will provide that help? Someone in pain. Who has known it. But this all sounded like boys had to be rescued and it was up to the girls they had disappointed and hurt to do the rescuing, which wasn’t what he wanted to impart at all. He could feel himself sliding back down the ladder.
Ah. Gotta love a prose off.
