The Fiction Garage (3): I Met a Man Upon a Stair
On bumping into one's forgotten former self, or vice-versa
You know that old rhyme, right? One of those jokey things which can, intentionally or not, mess with the mind of an especially neurotic, overthinking kid? This one:
I met a man upon the stair,
But when I looked, he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today —
I wish the heck he’d go away!
It doesn’t express exactly the sense I’m experiencing from diving back into stories I first wrote 30 years ago, and have ignored for maybe 10-15… but it’s in the right ballpark.
The “man” in question is ostensibly the common protagonist of all these stories I’m trying to anthologize. Until someone generously put out the call for the submission of ghost stories a few years ago, and needed them soon(ish), and I then reached for the character most familiar to me, I had probably not thought of Webster more than a few times in the last decade.
When that call came in for a ghost story, a reasonable person might’ve just, y’know, like, gone back to refresh their memory of at least a couple of the tales which already laid out Webster’s personality and history — and the style in which the tales had done so. But, well… naaaaah.
I’ve found it reassuring that Webster, yes, remains pretty much the same guy I remembered (and was hoping I’d find). James Thurber once wrote of a squirrel who frequented his neighborhood; this Mr. S, as Thurber called him, when threatened by an onrushing car would hesitate, waver, and jump back and forth before somehow managing to escape with head, tail, and everything in between intact. Substitute “calamity” for “car,” there, and you’ve pretty much got Webster in a nutshell. (Heck, forget “calamity.” Substitute “decision” and it still works.)
But Webster is just one of two long-unseen guys I’ve run into on the stairs this week. The other one: Webster’s creator. I don’t mean me, the person. I mean me, the writer.
Twenty-five, thirty years ago, when The Missus and I participated in a lively, intense, weekly writers’ workshop, she regularly — and rightly — warned me about my perhaps liking my own writing just a little too much. She admired, she insisted, that I could assemble sentences so nimbly, out of thin air; she questioned, though, my stubbornness about the sentences once assembled: my resistance to tinkering with them. I knew — know — exactly what she meant. It wasn’t exactly the stereotypical budding-creative-person’s Don’t tamper with my capital-AV Artistic Vision! going on. But it wasn’t exactly not that, either. I’d listen solemnly to others’ feedback about what I’d submitted that week, and I’d take careful notes and ask probing questions to help me understand what I could do better. And afterwards, I’d just be extremely selective (to put it mildly) about what I actually did to improve.
Of course, the proof would be in the pudding: I could wag in people’s faces all the work I’d actually had accepted at prestigious magazines. Except… Well, after one story, published in a small literary journal before I’d even joined the workshop, I had no acceptances to brandish. I got a few nibbles of interest, but embarrassed by not being accepted immediately, I’d just submit a piece somewhere else. And then, having submitted it to a few favorite, big-name targets, I’d just… give up.
Over the years, I eventually came to think of it, and to explain it, this way: I can write well enough. But I can’t tell a story for sh!t.
I won’t try to kid you: I still have no idea if I can tell a story for sh!t. I have no real idea for that matter if I’m a genuinely good writer, as a writer, or if I’m still kidding myself — still so bedazzled by what I think it means to spontaneously grab this word and juxtapose it with that one, so bedazzled that I can’t see all the trees through the dense, impenetrable forest of verbiage.
But I will tell you that I’ve found myself marveling at my exuberant display of… of something all those years ago. I had a spark, y’know? And that spark was in turn powering something, some engine of creation, a vehicle that has for years just sat up on blocks in the driveway, long uncranked. The driver’s seat is kinda mildewed, and cobwebs drape the steering wheel. Neighborhood kids have defaced the windows with graffiti, and I’ve embellished their scrawls with some of my own in fact. I doubt that it’ll start up even now.
But damn, I know I should be embarrassed to say so but: the thing still looks pretty to me.
The next steps in this project will probably be rather boringly technical, and I may or may not deal with the nuts-and-bolts details here. In rough form: I’ve now got a “book,” so to speak, edited and more or less final, in the raw form of a single Microsoft Word document. I think I’m going to write up very brief forewords to each story, as well as a preface or foreword to the book as a whole, and of course I have to build up a “table of contents” of some kind. And then, maybe within a few weeks, I’ll be ready to convert the whole thing to e-book format, and come to some kind of decision about the platform(s) on which I want to offer it (just Amazon? or Amazon and then some? as an e-book only, or in print form too?). I’ll probably have some fun preparing a book cover for it.
And then, finally, I can just generate and launch the damned thing… and move on to the next project, whatever it turn out to be.