October 17th, 2022 - Come Softly to Me
Dear TNY,
Fresh off a successful weekend trip in the van (over 200 miles!), I read this week’s offering, “Come Softly to Me”.
I’ll start with the positive. I wanted to not like this. It’s got so many characters and it’s just a jumble of shit. But, I realized I was about halfway through and while I knew I wasn’t forming bonds to any of these people (so no empathy), I was enjoying the craft. Specifically, I thought the rhythm was good (also, rhythm is an excellent word in Scrabble). Like, the pacing, the long sentences, even the meandering bits. I was into it. And I thought the vocabulary was good. I mean, motherfucker used “coprophagia”. You don’t see that one every day. So, overall, I feel like the author respected us enough to provide us with some food. I was eating to eat, you know. Not because there was a narrative here that had me gripped. Just because the food was good.
Which is a let down because I don’t think the story goes anywhere. Although I’m a true asshole, I’m not going to go back to figure out how many characters there are. Too fucking many, you know? It’s like, from the outset, it’s impossible to deeply connect to these people. Detail wise, I connected. I mean, my fucking dad died of esophageal cancer for chrissakes (technically pneumonia, but he wouldn’t have contracted that in the hospital if he had never had a reason to be there in the first place). So yeah, watching this dude with his peg tube and adding my own background to that sad shit, I could connect. Or the bag of fingernails and chewing gum up in the tree? Yes. So many details like that throughout. But it was like having two armloads full of hats walking around in a house with no place to hang them. Does that make sense? I had nobody to hang my feels on in this piece.
And that got me thinking about storytelling and its evolution and where we are now. That, and the impossible task of explaining the plot of Bullet Train to someone, which I did this morning. And I was thinking that there is extremely lazy storytelling in writing right now because most of the authors you print write characters like it’s a fucking movie. Like, the author just believes we are going to care about 20 people we don’t know right from the beginning of the story. Now, that could be because you, TNY, have trained a subset of readers to care about the story because of the author that wrote it, but that’s fucking ridiculous because the person doesn’t matter; the Art does. But my theory is that the modern writer is consuming visual arts far more often than ever before. So they expect when a scene opens in their mind, the characters are there, visually, they are whole with faces and body language and all the other bullshit that comes along with watching visual art. But that’s not true. We are not the author so we don’t fucking see it unless you make us see it. Back to Bullet Train. I think the moment Brad Pitt appears onscreen, we already know him. Right? We see these same actors on repeat and whether we want to recognize it or not, we believe we know who they are. This isn’t some new character in the movie. It’s Brad Pitt. It’s the same guy from Legends of the Fall and Snatch. As authors, not only do we not get visual queues of characterization for free, because nothing is fucking free in writing, we also don’t get the benefit of some known entity playing a character for us. That’s why I think writing has gotten lazier and lazier, particularly with regard to characterization. Because we have become tuned in to visual arts so hard that it’s altered the other arts. But that must work for a group of your readers because you keep dumping that type of trash on us (I say us because I read this shit, but I know it’s not for me). Where are the stories by authors who care more? Who are trying to get us to fall in love with the written word? With humanity? Where are the authors who see this way, see these things, feel these things? Who aren’t just shitting out words that we can’t hang our emotions on?
Man, who knows.
Bullet Train isn’t good. It won’t be good if it has Brad Pitt or anyone else in it. It’s just not good. And so many of these stories won’t be good, no matter who wrote them. And they won’t be good if the author thinks that we should care because he or she cares. The stories have to be good because they are intrinsically good. And if you think back on the shit that blew your fucking mind in the past decade, it’s not because of who was in it or who made it or what medium it was, it’s because it was good. Because it was Art.
Why not shoot for that, toots? What else do you have to live for? Your own ego?
Now, I’m going to order some parts for the van because some crooked fucker broke the antenna off in Astoria, OR. And I’m going to sit in the sun today. With a beer.
Later, you contentious motherfucker.
Nick
