Oh, yeah. The curse thing. Might as well get to that.
I heard it at the bar down the street, a few months after Brent and I had started living together. We had just finished our first annual, last ever, get-to-know-the-roommate-better night when Brent brought it up. He had gone through close to a pitcher of beer; I don’t think he would have told me the story otherwise.
“Have I told you I’m cursed?” he asked me.
“Only three times tonight and every other time you can’t figure out why your life isn’t perfect.”
“Ah,” was all Brent said in reply. He wasn’t sober enough to catch my annoyance. “You want to know why?”
I looked at him over my glass of beer. “Sure,” I said, fairly certain I was going to regret it.
Without all of Brent’s whining and self-deprecation, the story goes something like this:
Brent may seem like a ‘goody-two shoes,’ but I don’t care who you are; at fourteen years old, hormones take over and you’ll give your left kidney for porn. And from the way he talked, I can only guess that drama-boy was quite the connoisseur. I’m not clear on just how he had gotten his videos, I think from some well-meaning corruptive friend, but he had gotten himself a stock-pile of five or six.
Brent still gets nervous about what his parents think. When he was in middle school, he was deathly afraid of them. Brent kept his porn hidden under his bed. Not exactly the most clandestine place, but he was fourteen, give him a break. Anyway, he actually lost sleep worrying about what his parents would do if they ever found them, or if he left one of the tapes in the VCR, or if they found one of the cases lying around, or if…if…if…
You get the idea.
Anyway, and he gets some ingenuity points for this one, Brent decided he’d hide them in plain sight; namely inside some old Disney tapes he had. Not just inside the covers, but inside the tapes themselves. One night, when his parents went to some party or something, he opened up Bambi, Snow White, and a few others he knew he’d never watch again, exchanged the magnetic tapes with his porn’s magnetic tapes, and then closed them back up. He threw out the left-over casings and packaging from the porn, sneaking the remains to the bottom of the trash cans outside. When his parents got home that night, he was sleeping peacefully and they never suspected a thing.
Even though, as far as anyone could tell from looking at them, they were the Disney tapes, Brent still kept them out of sight under his bed. The switched out packaging should have fooled his parents just in case they went sniffing around his room. He knew they’d long ago forgotten about all the Disney crap they had bought him when he was a kid.
The problem was that four years later, Brent forgot all about them, too.
So one day, after Brent had graduated from high school and was preparing to move on to college, his parents saw the sheer amount of stuff he was leaving behind and suggested a yard sale. They pulled things from every nook and cranny of their home, and piles of Brent’s childhood were laid out for sale to the highest bidder.
Including the Disney tapes.
They sold them. All of them. And the best part is, they seemed to have all gone to different people.
So a week later, an old family friend shows up on their front porch, waving a VHS tape and demanding to know why her five year old had found herself watching Debbie Does Dallas instead of Peter Pan. Brent hadn’t remembered either, not at first, but when he listened to the woman’s story it… all… came… back.
Well, Brent ‘fessed up for the one, admitting to his parents that he had, four years ago, switched the guts of the tapes. They asked if he had done more of them and, teeth gritted, he admitted to it. Though, he answered truthfully, he couldn’t remember how many, probably only about two more, maybe. The lady backed him up there too, saying that the other tape had been ‘just fine.’
Brent spent the next week jumping whenever a car drove into his driveway. He half expected people to begin popping into his house, swinging Disney classics and complaining about therapy bills for their children.
But no one ever did.
The last few weeks passed, painfully and slowly enough, and his parents drove him to college and dropped him off. They had forgiven him, for the most part, and let the matter slide, except for a few snide remarks to his roommates who, once they had gotten the full story out of him, all insisted on shaking his hand.
The problem was, Brent explained to me, those tapes that never came back. He knew he had at least five tapes, he had memorized the titles, but he had never heard about the other four. He could only assume that the owners of the others hadn’t remembered where they had bought them, or that they didn’t know what they had. Or if the buyers had children who were old enough to appreciate such things, they probably hadn’t even found out about the problem. I can only imagine the look on some baby-sitter’s face, sitting the kids and herself down to watch Cinderella for the evening, and then a BJ shot shows up on screen.
This is where the curse comes in. Brent thinks that there are three possibilities: First, that he had so offended God that the Almighty’s been raining misfortune down on him ever since. Second, that karma hasn’t finished smacking him around for the trauma he no doubt has caused the kids who had seen the tapes. Or lastly, that it was a Gypsy family that had gotten hold of the tapes, and unable to return them and get their money back, had satisfied themselves by cursing the causer of such misfortune.
When Brent finished his story, he sat there, grinning at me over his glass, like he had just provided me with some primal truth about the world.
“That’s it?” I asked.
Brent looked surprised. “What do you mean ‘that’s it?’”
“I mean, ‘that’s it.’ You did something bad, so now you’re cursed?”
Brent flushed a bit. “Well, everything’s gone wrong since! And there was a family there, and they looked like they might have been gypsies!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said.
“It’s true!” he insisted.
“If you say so,” was all I said. I didn’t feel like arguing the point. It sounded more to me like Brent had finally found his way out from under his parents’ over-protective wings and had ran head first into life. When you have to pay your own bills, cope with professors, girl-friends, and roommates for the first time, of course it looks like everything’s going wrong. That was just how life was, though, and Brent had simply been too sheltered to have ever really experienced it before. He wasn’t cursed, just living.
But I wasn’t about to spend the last ten minutes the bar was open trying to tell him that.
”Comment
Okay, I’ve seen this around way too many times, and I am utterly sick of it.
I don’t have a problem with the whole list. There’s some good stuff there. But, believe you me, it has problems.
Now, while I have an issue, as a reader, with #2 (Never use prologues, he says. I like reading prologues, I say.), the issue I have the biggest problem with is #3 – Never use any word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Of course, this also brings in #4, as well, where you never use an adverb with “said”.
For the record, back before I ever put pen to paper, I read a dialogue heavy novel and realized how powerful a tool dialogue could be. I also realized that “said” could be replaced by dozens of other alternatives, helpfully supplied by the English Language, that all have more details attached to them. “Whispered” meant something was said quietly. “Hissed” had a serpentine aspect, if you wanted to imply deception or evil intent. “Bellowed,” denoted a boisterous personality, noisy, oblivious, and happy. “Shot back,” meant your character was being antagonistic with their response, even if the words themselves were polite. I could go on and on, but my point is that an alternative to “said” could hand your reader information about the character and their emotions without ever having to break dialogue. I consider this to be an efficiency of words, and something a good writer would do well to develop.
In the foolishness of youth, I reached the conclusion that you should never, ever, use the word “said”, because there was always a better alternative. Now, obviously, I don’t believe that anymore. But it’s a stylistic choice. My fantasy novel makes liberal use of alternatives to “said.” My more mainstream, “quick and dirty” web-serial, 1001 Insomniac Nights, uses primarily “said,” with the occasional “replied” and “sneered” to break up the monotony.
“Said”, as my wife relayed to me from her friend, is invisible. It’s like water. It’s useful, but it carries no weight. The alternatives, generously supplied to us by the language itself, have substance of their own.
Seriously, synonyms are one of the English language’s strengths. We’d be fools not to use them.
Now, I also protest to only using “said” because sometimes the work itself insists you use something else. Prose has a rhythm, a distinctive and insistent rhythm. And I listen to this rhythm, because it defines my writing. Too many times, a line simply hasn’t read right with just the word “said.” “Answered” was simply necessary for the flow of the paragraph.
I refuse to believe that our society has fallen so far that even in our dialogue we have to use a one syllable word above all others. I refuse to believe that using “blurted out” instead of “said” will confuse my reader.
And now, the fun part: Proving my point.
Let’s say I’m writing a scene where I have two characters standing in a crowded hall. One of them says to the other, “Who is that tart with the King?” Now, if I just write, “Beatrice said, ‘Who is that tart with the King?’” I tell my reader that she just blithely blurts that out. This leaves her open to being overheard, leading to possible intrigue and accusations of treason. Now, obviously, a sane person would say this under her breath. But is Beatrice sane? What if she’s the first sane person we’ve met in the novel? What if you just met her? What if she’s sane, but she ranks higher than the King, or has some black-mail on the King, and wants to show it off? Or maybe the point is that the kingdom is particularly lax and no-one cares if someone bad-mouths the King’s fling-of-the-week. These are questions that an intelligent reader will be wondering, upon reading that Beatrice speaks without bothering to muffle her voice.
“Ah ha!” says I. “I have to let my reader know that she’s sane, she doesn’t have naked pictures of the King, and speaking out of turn is not kosher.” Therefore, I have to imply that she pitches her voice low. I’d love to make this easy and say, “Beatrice whispered, ‘Who is that tart with the King?’” But I have to contend with Rule #3. So what about “Beatrice said quietly, ‘Who is that tart with the King.’” But wait! that violates the almighty rule #4. So what about, “Beatrice said, her voice pitched too low for any but Hero to hear, ‘Who is that tart with the King?’” There we go! And I only had to use eleven more words to accomplish that than if I had simply been willing to violate the almighty rule #3! What an accomplishment!
Wait! Maybe I should have used physical actions to imply that she’s whispering? What about, “Beatrice nudged Hero gently with her elbow and said, ‘Who is that tart with the King?’” That works. The action of nudging with the elbow implies exchanging a secret, keeping her voice low. Or maybe even, “Beatrice leaned close to Hero’s ear, cupping her hand over her mouth, and said, “Who is that tart with the King?” That works too! There’s no question she’s attempting to hide her words.
Of course, both these actions are implied with the word, “whispered.” And I’m still using at least seven more words. So, no, that’s not better.
Seriously, do I have to cite more examples? I’m not even going to bother getting into double entendres or words, like the rarely used “thanks”, that can be said with different inflections. Because it’s not like people have ever mistaken a person’s meaning on live-journals or instant messages because of a lack of tone of voice. It’s not like emoticons weren’t brought into existence so people could tell the difference between malicious and facetious. Oh, wait…
Look, I get it. Sometimes “said” is simple, concise, and and therefore perfect. I understand. I use it, often, for that very reason. But to imply that an author practicing intelligent word conservation is somehow flawed or amateurish because they’re trying to streamline their work? That’s just stupid.
I have had an epiphany that I’m sure others have already had. But I would like to share this one with you, anyway.
The question of “What use does literature serve?” isn’t a new one. Back in 1579, Sir Philip Sidney wrote “In Defense of Poesy”, an argument for the virtue of fictional literature. Because pre-dating that time, it was seen simply as fluffy entertainment, of no real value in and of itself.
My, how things have changed.
Still, if you’re not working on “high” art, you sometimes find yourself having to justify the relevancy of what you’re working on. Sometimes, “entertaining” simply isn’t enough. I remember going rounds in high school with a friend of mine over this, especially since I was working in a fantasy novel at the time, and he was challenging me as to why he should take it seriously.
I don’t know if I ever really produced an answer that satisfied him. Or that satisfied me, for that matter.
I saw a poster in high school that always resonated with me. It said, roughly paraphrased: “I read to see that I am not alone. And I write to show others that they are not alone.” At the time, I was a properly angsty, emo teenager and I instantly realized why I had been drawn to so many of the books I had been reading, that as I read through them, the author shared something with me and, somehow, made me feel not alone.
As a writer, I feel I have acquitted myself well on that score, at least concerning 1001Insomniac Nights . (Which if you’re not reading it, you SHOULD.) And when I write fantasy, I hope that I am giving my readers a reflection of the world, that I am giving them something to think about. I don’t know if I succeed, although simply telling a good yarn is usually satisfactory.
My epiphany, however, concerns science-fiction.
Now, this is one genre that, since high-school and reading Fahrenheit 451, I realized would never need to justify itself. Science-fiction is modern prophecy, a warning. “If you continue on this path, this is where you will end up.” The whole cyberpunk sub-genre is a critique of 80′s culture. Go back and read Brave New World and see if you don’t feel a shiver go down your spine when you realize just how close we are to becoming that hedonistic, self-centered, amoral world.
But even on top of that, there is the inspirational factor, and that was my epiphany. Science-fiction points to the sky and asks you, “Why not?” It paints a future of interstellar travel and other life and challenges you, challenges the whole human race, to make that future a reality. And really, that’s all the justification it needs. If Star Trek pseudo-science makes a child interested in interplanetary travel, if that child is then drawn to sciences in school, and if that child then grows up and figures out how to construct a nuclear-fusion based engine that gets us to near light-speed and a probe to Alpha Centauri in six-years, hasn’t it justified itself? And with the Constellation program now cut, this inspiration just became even more important.
Of course, can’t this inspiration be found in all genres? That’s the crux of Sidney’s argument – that fiction can inspire a person to virtue. Human advancement and development has always been pushed by inspiration. And if a fantasy can inspire a person to seek to make the world a better place, this isn’t that justification enough?
So, while pondering the usages of twitter as an advertising tool, I wondered whether or not “web-serial” could justify its own hashtag. So I do a search for it – and find entries. And somewhere among these entries, I see reference to a wiki-page. A WIKI-PAGE! And go check on it.
And sure enough, there’s a new wiki-page. New because there was already a wiki-page in 2003 or 2004-ish, thanks to an enterprising friend of mine, which mentioned that I exist. But I digress.
Anyway, so on said wiki-page, there’s links to web-pages that are devoted to reviewing and linking web-serials.
So I go to the first two, I’m sure there’s more to find and I’ll do that some other night, and of course I submit my web-serial to be approved to be linked.
But it’s dumb-founding, to be honest. When I first started 1k1in, there was nothing on ‘net about web-serials. I think there was one other that popped up around the same time. But for the most part, no one had heard of, nor read, a web-serial. And now, seven years later, it’s here. Wiki pages, web-serials, reviewers, everything. Where the hell was everyone, seven years ago.
Here’s a free tip to all aspiring writers: If you want your readers to love your characters, you better love them too. Because your reader will know. Believe me, they will know.
This was the lesson Holly taught me, in all her passion and charm. When I was writing 1001 Insomniac Nights, Holly was my favorite character. And in the end, she was the favorite characters of my readers, too. When you love a character, it will come out in your writing, and your reader cannot help but love them, too.
Who is Holly? Well, for starters, she’s the hot-tempered manager of the local Baskin Robbins. She does not suffer fools lightly and occasionally acts without really thinking through the consequences. But she has the confidence, and personality, to pull it off. She also won’t hesitate to toss an ice-cream cone at you, if you really, really deserve it.
I have a Twitter account! Follow me.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, I had an epiphany a few days ago. It was the realization that one of 1001 Insomniac Nights‘ strengths is, if you’ll forgive me a little preening, the myriad of funny one-liners. I’m fairly sure I can find at least good one in every post. So sure, in fact, that I’m going to start a little weekly advertising tradition.
Every Friday morning, after the weekly post goes up, I’m going to “tweet” my favorite one-liner in the story along with a link to the post. And if you like the one liner, or the post, or just the web-serial in general, “re-tweet” the one liner. And if you find a line in there you like more, well, tweet that one instead.
I’m a firm believer in “word of mouth” advertising. Almost every book I ever loved was recommended to me by a friend first. And I’m hoping that people will like 1001 Insomniac Nights enough to recommend it to friends.
So – If you love it, re-tweet it.