Saturday 6/22/24
One thing bad writers like to do in order to try and sound arty and fool the kind of people who are looking to be fooled is write stories in the second person.
These almost never work because they take the form of a narrator telling a main character all of these things that the main character already knows. It'd be like walking up to me and saying, "You run stairs. Your name is Colin. You write better than all of these people. You publish thousands of things."
Um, okay. Hi, I'm me. I know these things so why would I be declaring them to myself in stentorian fashion?
You need a good reason to write a story in the second person, and trying to cover up for your lack of ability by doing what I call a writerly move is not a sufficient one.
A writerly move is when the writer is in effect saying, "Look at me! I'm writing! Don't you see how I'm writing! Isn't this creative what I'm doing? See me writing? Yes? Yes? Can't you see me really really really writing?"
Here's an excerpt from a story called "Bed of Nails" by Kathy Stevens put forward by Sigrid "You Can Just Call Me Bigot" Rausing in Granta. Like all Granta stories, it's bad Creative Writing 101 from someone with an MFA. This is always how it is. It's the right kind of person, too, which is what a classist like Sigrid Rausing cares about.
This shit is so wearying in its bald badness, but let's trudge on. Ready? Here we go:
If there’s a patch of slimy mud or some coarse gravel or some freshly fallen snow, and nobody’s around, your girlfriend is going to take off her panties and lie in it. Her skin is like British Museum marble, and she’s got this incredibly pink pussy that always looks sore. You were fascinated by it at first, but now watching yourself go in and out of it turns your stomach, like seeing a shoe rub a blister.
Your girlfriend has long red hair and maybe this is why you thought she was attractive. Red hair is like a trick played on lads’ minds. Sometimes you wonder if she’d be pretty at all if she shaved her head. The hair on her pussy is ginger and her eyelashes are very pale. If you asked her to shave her head she would. Her obedience frightens you, and you’re increasingly careful not to ask for anything.
At first, doing it with her was satisfying, if a little strange. Lately, she’s not letting you finish. It’s like she reaches a point of maximum discomfort, and therefore satisfaction, and then gets up and starts getting dressed, leaving you there flailing. Come on, she says. And you follow her home with it tucked into your waistband, waiting for the moment you can lock yourself in your parents’ downstairs loo and finish the job over the bowl. Your girlfriend is turning you into a deviant, and it isn’t even your fault.
None of this makes any sense, of course.
Who is this narrator? Who would know these things better than the protagonist, so why does he need this didactic lecture? The third party needs to tell him what color his girlfriend's pubic hair is? It's the voice in the narrator's head? No it isn't. Again, it'd be like me telling myself my own name. You wouldn't do that, unless you'd just recovered from amnesia or some brain injury.
Do any of these writers every think about the logistics of what they're doing?
The shoe rubbing a blister thing doesn't make sense. The penis is the shoe? It's a shoe-penis? And wouldn't it be lancing a blister anyway? Which can only happen the once, not multiple times, as with thrusting.
Who is this narrator stating, "She doesn't let you orgasm, man," as if the non-orgasmer didn't know? Why tell the story this way? With the strident, play-by-play voice? The bellowing voice through a megaphone on the sidelines?
What's the story anyway? That some guy has a kinky girlfriend who plays with power dynamics? Is that a story? Is that even worth mentioning? Why should we care? What does this have to do with us and our lives? Is it solely so people who once had a girlfriend like that can say to themselves, "I once had a girlfriend like that." And bathroom masturbation is deviance? Really? So then like everyone who has ever lived is a deviant?
You buying any of this? I'm not buying any of it. But we're not meant to buy it. This isn't for us. This wasn't written for readers. It wasn't published for readers. None of this is for readers.
I'm making a go at finishing some works this weekend, which brought me here. One of them is a story called "A Treat," so we'll use that for this particular prose off. It's told by a man about this other man--around thirty-years-old--who lives in his building and frequently has McDonald's delivered.
He pieces together a story of a life based upon this information and what it means or suggests to him. The story is about the kind of adult who has McDonald's delivered to them while living alone, and about that particular neighbor, but it's more about the narrator himself. And about us, too. How the narrator thinks about his neighbor and what his neighbor is doing is going to be its own story. The narrative emerges from the things he wonders, the conclusions he draws, the conclusions he discards or moves away from.
We're going to learn quite a bit about him from what he makes of his neighbor who lives alone having McDonald's delivered and left outside on the front stairs.
I say often that the world wants to give you narrative. It's all around us, in everything, provided you're able to see it.
This is not a second person story. But what we have instead is the usage of the word "you" not as second person per se, but as a kind of universality that originated with the personal and proceeds to brung us all together--narrator of the story, and the readers. Move from the personal to the universal while actually keeping in a real sense with the deeply personal, and you involve everyone on a personal level to which they can relate. It's a voice talking with you, not megaphoning in information from the sideline. It's togetherness.
Ready? Here we go:
Seems like you can judge someone based on them having McDonald’s delivered if they’re an adult and they don’t have kids. Should an adult be eating McDonald’s on their own? I think it would be okay if you were traveling and in a hurry. Let’s say you had to drive a couple states away to a funeral for your friend from college who died of cancer and you couldn’t get off from work as early as you wanted to on Friday so there was no time to spare and if you were going to eat it would have to be at a McDonald’s on the side of the highway, but probably with the food on your lap as you drove because that was a dear, dear friend never mind that you’d fallen out of touch with them which you feel guiltier about now despite what had been your sincere and ongoing desire to rectify that matter with a thoughtful, expansive letter you hadn’t officially started and you want the chance to say a few words you really mean to their parents whether it matters or not because it might, be that now or later, and if not in this world then somewhere else because love means making sure all the things in your heart are gotten to the best that you can no matter how late you become aware of the full force of them.
I can see that being a time for an adult to eat at McDonald’s. Or if you have kids, because they love it. A high-level treat to them. If kids had to rank treats, McDonald’s might top the poll. Number one in the rankings, for a season or two.
Then there are guilty pleasures, which is perhaps the adult term for treats, though you could also argue it smacks of a hand job in a strip mall massage parlor. “I had this crazy craving for some McDonald’s fries!” Okay. Understood. Let’s not make it a habit, though.
There's a long sentence in there. It's 191 words. But it's not a run-on sentence. Reading it, one is apt not to even consciously note its length, because it moves downhill, as I say. The flow of the words will take you where we're going. You don't have to do anything.
But everything you write has to be for reasons. That sentence details a drive across multiple states. A good push across the map. It also mentions the writing--or the writing that never got done--of an expansive letter. The sentence itself, in shape and scope, parallels these two ideas: the drive, the letter. Architecturally it mirrors them. Sense-sound-structure are aligned.
That this narrator is creating this sentence in a manner suggestive of what we do and how we might express ourselves at some length when we feel something intensely, suggests that maybe he's speaking from experience. That the hypothetical friend--and we're all thinking about a friend now who fits the patterns of this bill from our own lives--was his actual friend, but he's not going into the specifics. Why? Can he not face that? Is it still too hard? Was none of this his intention in talking about his neighbor ordering McDonald's and this is a case of a story beginning to tell him, the narrator, if you will?
We tell stories, yes, but stories tell us. I don't mean tell us information in this case. I mean they do the telling of us. Of who we are.
He's using "you" in that sentence, but it's not second person; it's the universal us, though this is obviously very personally felt. And look what the narrator knows. Which he probably learned from that experience whose specifics aren't contained here, but nor do they need to be. Look at what value what he knows has for us, the reader.
"...love means making sure all the things in your heart are gotten to the best that you can no matter how late you become aware of the full force of them."
Yes. How do we read that and fail to understand its truth, regardless if we've never thought that before?
This is what you're going for. This is what you want. This is what it's about. It's what you need to have in what you write.
