Previously in this series.
You are a young man driving across the country, thinking about the women in your life and the various ways in which they have disappointed you.
You saw something horrifying at the circus.
Sometimes you think about just picking up and leaving this filthy city, but then one morning you wake up and watch the sky turn from narcissus-white to the delicate, throbbing, vein-purple hues of the nodding heads of crocuses and irises, the ones you remember picking from your mother’s garden when you were still young and unafraid, and there above the Gowanus you see a map of your future, your past, and your heart (but not in an overwrought or sentimental way.)
Your father never said he loved you, not once, not to your face, not to your heart.
The snake is a metaphor.
You sit at the bar and have a drink. When you finish your drink you have another. You drink in a way that is simple and direct and not at all in imitation of Hemingway or Carver, and if it is then it’s an homage, a subtle, searingly thought-provoking homage, and the bartender is a charming old gent who calls you “hoss” and not a college girl with a swallow tattoo on her breastbone.
Bullies ruined your Halloween costume.
The world is baroque in its cruelty.
The dog is a metaphor.
That’s not what you meant.
“I just wish you would express your feelings more,” your girlfriend says. “I never know what you’re thinking.” You drink your drink. If only your girlfriend knew what you were thinking. Your thoughts are so brutal and true that they would scare her witless. She would die. And even through the buffer of this short story, female readers are probably becoming barren just by encountering the power of your thoughts, right at this minute, right now.
Her laugh was like the jangle of a charm bracelet, or like the wind whispering in the branches of an aspen, or like waves crashing on the beach, or like something else that doesn’t really sound at all like laughter, or even any sound a human can make, to be honest.
There is an ethnic person nearby, but they are dispensing with excellent advice. Their voice is cracked and earthy, like the earth. If they were your father they would say they loved you, to your face and to your heart. “Chile,” they say, “sho nuff, this crazy world goes on a-spinnin’ and don’t nobody know where it gon’ stop.” You nod sagely. It is good to take the G Train.
The G Train is a metaphor.
The love of a good woman will save you. A good woman will place her cool hand upon your feverish brow and not like the bands you don’t like. A good woman will know she is a metaphor, and accept it.
You drove all day and into the night. It was good to be out west. When you stopped at the filling station, the attendant wore a denim jacket and asked if you’d be staying in Idaho long. “Maybe I will,” you said as you watched the sunset over the whatever river they have out here, or some mountains or something, who cares. “Maybe I will.”
Tags: books, how to tell what novel you’re in, humor, sarah marshall
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A.P. Literature Unit Plan on Ms. Palmer’s Novel, Pretty in Ink*!
If you are a woman, you are a metaphor for sexism, or nature destroyed by man, or the lure of discovery.
If you are nature destroyed by man, you are a metaphor for a woman.
Not barren from the heavy man thoughts, but I’ve quite possibly ruptured something from stifling giggles at my desk.
Also — Sarah Marshall of Portland State University! Do you know Leni Zumas? She was my Intro to Creative Writing teacher at Hunter a few years back!!
Yes!! She is a goddess, but of course you already know that. She was also my thesis advisor and savior and G-Train-Land.
SHE IS THE BEST!!!! ahhhhhhhhh brb gotta go read her short stories again
“female readers are probably becoming barren just by encountering the power of your thoughts”
Oh, yes. That’s the tone I recognize.
The metaphor is a metaphor.
The mixed metaphor is a metaphor for the metaphor.
The metaphor is like a simile.
“Do you even know what a metaphor is?”
“It’s like a thought with another thought’s hat on.”
A good woman will know she is a metaphor, and accept it.
why I’m single
Ugghhhh it’s true and depressing.
How to tell if you’re in an undergrad creative writing story: You are a young college student of the same gender and sexual orientation as your author. You get drunk at a party and have a one night stand with an attractive stranger, and probably look at the stars at some point.
Bonus points if you look at the stars while sitting on a car, smoking a cigarette, in a convenience store parking lot, which is a metaphor of the suburban banality of your youth and how you crave to escape it in the big city.
Your drug use is a metaphor.
Your drug use is a metaphor…for witchcraft.
Wait no.
oh god it hurts because it’s so trueeee
“he went to a party. there were drugs, like oxycontin. he drove his truck to the party where there were drugs, like oxycontin. he had bad sex with his girlfriend at the party. sometimes she reminded him of his mom. his mom was kind of hot. he wondered about his boner. if he wrote a verse about his mother, would it fit on his boner? his dong was magnum so no problems there, except that he maybe wanted to have a boner with his mom”
“he left the party. he left in his truck. he had driven it to the party, where he had a boner.”
Flesh this out a little, and I think you’ve got something publishable here.
Oh god was that an intentional pun? That was perfect.
He is Archer.
The world IS baroque in its cruelty!
Someone makes reference to a landmark in Iowa, and you are briefly hopeful that you have found a writer who shares your uncommon geographic background, who might even know your hometown. In the next paragraph he has obtained his degree and returned to New York.
Especially those in Iowa City workshop. Plot has protagonist in Grinell but not sure why.
You’re like the author, but you’re also a space captain and people actually listen to you for a change
You masturbate for a very long time while thinking of women who wronged you. (I had to hear someone read this one out loud.)
Her laugh was like the clatter of carpet tacks dropped into an empty paint bucket. It quickly turned into a cough–a dry, rustling noise, like a folded dollar being shoved into a ceramic coin bank.
“Sorry,” she said, more out of routine than remorse. She passed a Kleenex over her mouth. “Rare form of emphysema. Months to live.” She grunted to hide another cough. It sounded like funnyman Dom DeLuise being smacked in the forehead with a raw pork chop.
oh my god i thought i was losing it but then i read dom deluise and then i really lost it.
You are in New York, or recently transplanted to or from New York, and the city turns up periodically as a metaphor or some other damn thing even when the story takes place somewhere else. Subway trains, skyscrapers, street vendors, and delis turn up because why not, universal life experience, everyone lives in cities so whatever.
Her voice was like violets or dark chocolate or the smell of chemicals in a hardware store or something else not a suitable way to describe voices.
I hate the recurring use of New York City life as a stand-in for shared life experiences so, so much. Sigh.
I hate it so much I could write a book about it. The book would not take place in New York.
Endorsed. I have like no shared experience with New York. LIke at all. 😀
I grew up in what is essentially a suburb of New York and I STILL don’t get it.
Same here. I grew up in a New Jersey suburb not far from New York, and when I did my stereotypical run-away-to-the-gritty-city thing, I moved to Worcester, Massachusetts.
New York was like a woman: mysterious, metaphorical, created by men and for men, drawing men in only to spit them out, cold and miserable, into the East River, which was a metaphor for birth or their dicks or something.
Sex, that’s what it was a metaphor for. Sex. With a woman. Who was New York.
Life was simpler back in your Small Midwestern Town. There were no trains to miss, and you never saw any homeless people because you did not go to the part of town where they were. Still, no one understood you or your Ambitions.
A guy in one of my writing classes once described a woman his protagonist saw on the street as having “waiting-in-line-at-the-post-office breasts.” That was the exact wording. Waiting-in-line-at-the-post-office breasts.
To his credit, when questioned he basically just shrugged and said “Yeah, I don’t know.”
Clearly, she was balancing packages on them.
If she’s closer to my age and build, she’s resting them on / supporting them with the packages.
To be fair, whenever I go to the post office, there’s always a ton of absolute boobs in front of me who seem to be completely unfamiliar with what a post office is or the services it offers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlD08Rh6xa8
Is that like Stringer Bell’s 40 degree day?
Like…the kind of boobs you would stare at, but only if you were waiting in line at some mundane place and you were just off in space and then they passed into your line of sight, but you’re not really looking, it’s just, it’s the post office.
Is what he should have said.
Can’t stop laughing! His reaction is THE BEST.
We could take it literally: that woman only has those breasts when she’s waiting in line at the post office, or on her way there. They’re prosthetics; she’s had a bilateral mastectomy and most days doesn’t bother, but she’s got an enormous crush on the sweet fifty-something woman behind the counter, who smiles at her just so. Maybe one day she’ll have the courage to say something.
HAHAHA I HATE MEN SO MUCH
Forget it, Jake. It’s the post office.
I heard this exact story recently—except, of course, the woman was called “girl” throughout. The fact that the man was called “boy” did not make me feel better about that.
All the outsider feelings of being the only one in my creative writing class to write a weird historical fiction short story in a room full of angsty memoirs just came hurtling back. ENOUGH WITH THE METAPHORS YOU SHALLOW ASSHATS. YOU ARE 20, NOT WIZENED WITH AGE.
In the last undergrad fiction-writing class I took, for our last assignment, the professor told us we could write anything.
“Anything?” I said.
“Well, yeah, anything. So long as it’s not, like, young adult, or fantasy…what did you have in mind?”
“Young adult fantasy.”
(To his credit, he then agreed to let us write even that. He was a pretty fantastic professor.)
That’s pretty awesome. I was really encouraged in my class, even though I felt like I was completely different from my classmates. Our instructor was passionate about history and well-written fiction, and she even pointed me in some great directions for researching the area and time period I had chosen to write about. So at least we both had some support in our endeavors!
That’s great that your instructor was so helpful! My professor didn’t really get fantasy fiction, so he couldn’t be quite as helpful, but he was supportive all the same (and was also surprisingly helpful and knowledgeable when I turned in a short story chock-full of musical references).
I know exactly what you mean about the classmates…I’m not sure how my classmates felt about me. On that final assignment, one guy turned in the first chapter of a sci-fi/vaguely-dystopia-I-think novel he was working on. In our class critique, the professor said something like “Well, it seems pretty cliché, but maybe people who read that genre like that sort of thing.” And I went on a little rant about how speculative fiction works from archetypes, not clichés, and clichés are just as bad there as they are anywhere else. Without considering the feelings of the poor guy whose story was cliché…
I was really lucky to have an awesome writing instructor who was just as enthusiastic about genre fiction (for lack of a better word) as he was about high literature. Seriously, he brought back my love of writing fiction after another workshop killed it dead for a few years.
See, I need that. Prior to college I wrote stories in an array of subgenres that quietly improved the more I wrote, and I did it because I genuinely enjoyed doing it. Then in college I learned that I was doing it wrong and wasn’t being ambitious. Plus all valid examples were variations on realist literature. (This was not actually bad instructors but more just what constitutes canon.)
I dragged my way away from that after a few years, but by then most of the joy had been sapped from the whole enterprise, replaced by pressure to be Good. A bit later I just moved on entirely.
Whelp. Now I’ve made myself sad. IF I WANTED TO HAVE FEELINGS I WOULD READ… oh wait, I’m reading The Toast. Yeah, this is about right.
I never got to college creative writing because my high school creative writing class was terrible (“don’t think of yourself as a writer, think of yourself as a CONDUIT!” quoth my teacher. “let the words FLOW through you onto the page.”) but I do distinctly recall listening to all my classmates reading stories that were either about murder or existential ennui, and presenting them with my short story about angsty gay Victorians who referred to each other as Alexander and Hephaestion.
Are you me? I had the same high school experience! And I write short stories about angsty gay libertines! God, I wish I had taken creative writing in college, though. I love writing despite the pretentious “it’s-a-metaphor” crowd.
I was the only one in my high school class to finish Moby Dick – it was a mandatory class project, but none of the literary snobs would read it. So I was the only one who read and understood that “The Cassock” was an entire chapter dedicated to whale penises. God bless you, Herman Melville.
Bah, your HS’s literary snob crowd is fakers. True literary snobbery is reading Moby-Dick and insisting that it’s terribly serious literature with no vulgar or homoerotic bits at all. (Also, howsabout that sperm-squeezing chapter? I was not prepared for that the first time I read it)
Relevant to your interests: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/so-you-want-to…
I read the first one and I now cannot breathe. I have lol’d and I am this close to rotfl-ing. Thank you.
Making love to your spouse of eight years shortly after entering the room where she/he was just finishing bathing/reading/drinking an oaky Cab, sighing softly, and announcing: “We haven’t made love in over a week. We used to make love every other day. I want to make love to you now.”
I don’t know why, but this is where I lost it.
i love this with a hundred hearts.
i lost my mind at the dialect. LOST. MY. MIND.
I will be no mans metaphor; never not ever, not even in fiction.
…this has been assorted thoughts by plspassthePinot
His dog, the best friend of his lonely childhood, died. Everything he loved died, he thought, as he lit a cigarette and drove in the rain to his empty house alone (where all of the plants were dead too.) . The cigarette is a metaphor, as it burns to ashes.
Did the car die before he arrived at the empty house??
It caught on fire and burned to ashes. The ashes are a metaphor.
When I read:”You once saw something horrifying at the circus” immediately heard: “I saw something nasty in the woodshed”.
Stella Gibbons would give these quotes so many asterisks of “literariness” (They are truly Mr Mybug’s kin, especially with those throbbing purple crocuses.)
“There’s always been Starkadders on the G train.”
You went to Africa, once, when you were bitter and shallow and arrogant. It doesn’t matter where in Africa. Somewhere hot. You met the people who lived there and they were full of a simple goodness despite the terrible things happening to them (because they live in Africa), and this made you angry, because didn’t they understand about the cruel vagaries of Life? At the end, it turns out they were the ones teaching you about Life. You come home with a sense of virtuous self-importance you mistake for perspective.
You start a blog about how you left your heart in Africa and are so much better than everyone and also your past self, who you are not anymore. You discuss, at length, adoption of an African Child. You are better now, and different, and better.
I’m in Africa right now. Maybe I should write a story about the fact that, although I am in Africa, I am STILL reading the Toast.
Wait, is this a character in a MFA workshop story, or just my actual ex-boyfriend??
In my one graduate level writing course a woman wrote a non-fiction story about the time she got into a car accident (in the US) after visiting a bakery and how the bagels she had bought spilled onto the road and the professor chewed her out for a painfully long time about the careless and racist way she had invoked images of Palestinian terrorism, so.
My face is contorting itself into some weird expressions right now.
Yeah I’m not sure that class really helped me become a better writer.
D:
wh
what
…whut?
“It is good to take the G Train.”
LIES.
The G train is a metaphor for never getting to work on time.
Or for never getting home if it’s after 8pm. *heavy sigh*
The G train is a metaphor for all nine circles of hell. All of them. At the same time.
As I do not nor ever plan on living in NYC, part of my brain is interpreting “the G Train” as “the (O)G Train,” which makes it delightful and badass.
absolutely no one has a cell phone because they are inauthentic. it’s not set in the past or anything, it’s just: no one has a fucking phone.
Except for phonies.
+1
I rarely read fiction set in the present day, but it drives me bugfuck when I do and it takes place in 2014 and somehow no one has cell phones or computers, OR for whatever reason they’re totally reliant on chatspeak. Is the author even aware of the millions of people who use cell phones and computers and are normal, not illiterate 14-year-olds or Amish elders?
But the chatspeak is a biting satire of our modern times, times in which everyone except me is illiterate and shallow. (something something about Kardashians, something about tweeting photos of your breakfast)
Flip side of this: I teach contemporary literature, but anything written more than, say, 10 years ago does *not* feature everyone having cell phones all the time, so my students often feel like those books are way more dated than I do.
I was taken to task in workshop for writing too much sex. This continues to baffle me ten years on.
(Also, I’ve a perverse nostalgia for the G train. Scrappy little critter that it is.)
“….as you watched the sunset over the whatever river they have out here, or some mountains or something, who cares.”
OMG YES. Or you are in Turkey. Or Greece. Or some weird place like that. And the people are so authentic, unlike your descriptions of the landscape or the language or the food.
Aaah! I make it a point to avoid fiction written about Turkey by non-Turks. I have read stories either saying how much more quaint and authentic they are, or how they are shallow and sleazy. It’s a wee bit personal as I am half-Turkish.
AAAAH me too! Ever since I read this train wreck of a book called This Is Not Civilization that managed to insult/flatten/stereotype Kyrgyz, Turks, and Navajos, and seems to have been written by the kind of guy we’re all making fun of who had also been in the Peace Corps or something. I’m part Turkish-Jewish (and various not-TurkISH-but-TurkIC things) and have lived in Turkey, so I take it kind of personally too. Actually, the only novel I’ve ever read that’s not in Turkish ‘that has a Turkish-Jewish character in it was written by a non-Turk, and of course the character was a heavily stereotypical villain.
Wait, what?! Kyrgz, Turks AND Navajos? How on earth do you manage that? I’m not doubting you- I just see it as a tricky thing to manage.
I think “The Historian” managed to have Turkish characters who were at least not villainous even if they were a bit “kindly forgein scholar who offers you tea.” But I like to pretend that was more a stereotype of historical scholars than of Turkish gentlemen.
And the people are so authentic, unlike your descriptions of the landscape or the language or the food.
Daaamn, that burn..
This is all too close to the bone.
Also, in my MFA there was a guy who wrote a story about a steampunk London that had become a utopia after expelling all women except for a few they kept as prostitutes. He had a tiny ponytail and was 34 at the time.
Creepy Mr. Thirtysomething-With-Ponytail was in your workshop, too? Oh God, they are LEGION.
Interesting, since all of the steampunk I’ve ever read (which is a fair amount) is bursting at the seams with Culturally Atypical Victorian Women.
Eventually one of the women who was Not Like Other Girls transitions (written in the skeeviest way possible) because she recognizes how much better male society is? Or something?
Yes! Steampunk Victorian London is spilling over with these charming characters. Like how contemporary Scandinavia has a significant problem with serial killers for a set of countries with such a low comparative incidence of violent crime.
I assume you are using the past tense to describe this guy because he withered and expired under the force of the flames coming out of your eyes.
When I finally caught up with New Girl on Netflix, I was like WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS MOMENT? Spot-on parody of creepy ponytailed guys with pseudo-intellectual tendencies in workshops and seminars everywhere.
http://asset-a.soup.io/asset/3040/9590_a841.gif
THERE IS ALWAYS THAT GUY
FUCK THAT GUY
UGH
The other day a friend read me a sentence from a writing workshop piece (not his) that said, hand to god: “She cupped her chin in her girlish fingers and stared at me with penstemon-sparked eyes.”
I had to look up penstemon; apparently it’s a flower, alternately called beardtongue. Sexy.
I like “beardtongue eyes” better than “penstemon-sparked eyes.” It has a similar WTF-factor, but the *tone* is different, you know? Fuzzier.
Oh shit someone become a pirate called Beardtongue before some shitty indie band takes it.
Why am I so angry now?
This is so wonderful, Sarah Marshall. I wish I could make a tortured metaphor for you to express what it’s like to relate to this. Alas, I dropped out of MFA school, but not before saying, more than once to a COMPLETELY SURPRISED colleague, “This scene is incredibly misogynistic. Was that a conscious choice you made?”
Man, there were days when I was a lot younger and I would read small literary journals so I could what’s considered the best of current literature and yeah…
I eventually learned that it’s okay to write my silly little adventure stories.
I just this moment finished reading an MFA workshop piece which I will excerpt here and now and hope this isn’t a huge ethical breach of trust:
“Her pixie haircut wasn’t the type that drew me to most women. I hate short hair on women! If she hadn’t been wearing blush and had such high cheekbones and a small head, I would have thought she were a man because of her hair.”
“After glancing her up and down, almost unconsciously, the way I so often enjoy doing (I say “enjoy,” because why else would I keep on doing it?), I went back to joshing with my guys.”
“I thought about my penis—somehow looking at breasts and thinking about a woman does that to me—and I felt a little stirred. This stirring was not unusual in a way: as a sensitive man I’m often moved by what I see and hear. But it was not my emotions alone stirring this time. My penis was actually stirring, and this movement surprised me.”
“As she turned, I found myself looking at her tits and ass. Couldn’t stop myself. Guiltily, I looked up at her head area to cleanse myself.”
The cleansing power of the woman’s head area.
I didn’t know Xander Harris was in an MFA program
If only. Past middle-age family therapist.
*weeps*
jesus christ
NO.
Christ almighty, just set the boy on fire and send him on his way.
Who keeps giving these people passing grades? How do they keep being this terrible long enough to get to the point of an MFA.
“It’s NOT a metaphor! My ACTUAL PENIS is stirring!!!” Oh my god and the cleansing power of the female head area, AS LONG AS THEY DON’T HAVE MAN HAIRCUTS.
I don’t think that was a breach of ethics, because I absolutely refuse to believe that you did not make that up.
That is a healthy stance to take–I wish I could do the same. There are 20 full pages, and my constructive feedback is required.
Thank you for your careful description of the experience of being A Man. Right now, I see you describing women’s body parts, but I haven’t seen references to actual women. Have you considered bringing women as subjective beings into the story? Can you tell us about Miss Pixie-Cut as a person, rather than as a collection of hairstyles, breasts and penis-stirring cheekbones?
Also, I see you using the word ‘sensitive.’ Are you sure that word describes the personality of your protagonist? In the words of a great literary critic, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
That is actually beautifully concise and much better than how I would like to reply to that sort of thing*.
*a single envelope with a box of matches inside and a small note reading “aggressively apply to face”
Set them on fire and return the ashes with a note saying “It’s better this way.”
OH GOD it’s actually worse/funnier/more terrible and depressing than the goddamn satire. Men literally think about women like this. LITERALLY. THINK. THESE THOUGHTS. ABOUT OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. AND THEMSELVES IN RELATION TO OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. Because Goddess forbid it ever NOT BE ABOUT YOUR BONER AND HOW SENSITIVE AND THOUGHTFUL IT IS.
I will never ever stop being completely unpleasantly surprised and depressed and discombobulated by this phenomenon.
But somehow if feminism is about hating men then that makes it BAD.
any dude who uses the phrase “joshing with my guys” makes my vagina shrivel up like a dried peach
“My penis was actually stirring, and this movement surprised me.”
This is my favorite sentence of all time.
Now I can’t stop imagining a boner stirring a cup of coffee and it’s killing me.
The boner is a metaphor.
Your comment slayed me. Thank you.
That reminds me, I need to get my (already short) hair trimmed even shorter.
Terrifying. Especially as a female with a shorn head.
He needs to blow smoke rings and stare wistfully as they dissipate into the starry sky.
and with that, the last wisps of remorse over skipping grad school faded into the ether.
ALSO, “as she turned, i found myself looking at her tits and ass.” tits AND ass? which way is she turning? is this a cubist woman, composed merely of penis-stirrers and a nebulous “head area?”
If you’re wondering what kinds of things a nonfiction cubist woman says, here is one:
…After I told her this story, she just sits there on the bed, wrapped in a sheet.
“I just want to hold you. To feel you. You’re so real. The things you have to face. The things you’ve seen and done and heard. Hard to believe really.”
“I know. For me too. The beauty and the ugliness too.”
someone needs a workshop on basic sentence diagramming stat, in addition to human anatomy 101
UNPOSSIBLE. No.
REFUSE.
YOU JUST HAVE SO MUCH WISDOM AFTER GROWING UP IN THE SUBURBS OF CHICAGO.
Wait, is this something someone wrote in earnest and not satire? That would be terrifying, but all too believable.
‘kay, i’m gonna need a print of that cubist lady, stat. or maybe a tattoo.
To be fair, there are mostly kick-ass women writers in my creative nonfiction workshops.
Or maybe a comic-book woman in one of those anatomically impossible poses? Which I guess is pretty much the same thing.
You have sex with an ethnic woman. She dies tragically. Now you are able to feel emotions again.
She is much, much younger than you, but wise beyond her years. She’s not academic or intellectual like you are, but rather has the instinctive knowledge of an exotic breed of dog. She can smell fear.
Okay:
1. This is completely awesome as intended and I love it;
2. I read “has the instinctive knowledge of an exotic breed of dog” as meaning she instinctively knew a lot about one specific breed, like maybe a Xoloitzcuintli. PLEASE MAKE THIS INTO A NEW TROPE.
I loved this so much.
It reminds me of a classmate’s short story I was forced to read in a college workshop. The protagonist was lime green jello which had accidentally been left in a bowl on top of the refrigerator and forgotten. Of course, left to its own devices the lime green jello began to mutate into a living creature of doom. I sat quietly seething for 20 minutes as the professor and my classmates discussed and critiqued the “work”.
It has been decades since that story came into my life and I am still angry about it. But this article and these comments have made me feel much less alone.
At one graduate reading, a girl read a story about a civil war between two tribes of whales. I couldn’t understand anything she said because she was laughing so hard.
My husband kept only one short story (besides his own) from his undergraduate creative writing class. It’s a Fight Club-manqué with mystifying grammar, spelling and punctuation.
Upon close reading, it becomes clear that every character in the story is actually a dog.
(Was the bad grammar a conscious choice, because dogs don’t speak English very well? It is unclear.)
Wait, he went to undergrad with Erin Hunter? Just read this book for a book review group,
I dunno. Given a choice between that synopsis and any of the snippets from the article above, I’d choose sentient jello any day. Compare:
…and standing there watching her profile he finally felt something new–not reborn not that precisely nothing so dramatic–but he felt he would look back years from now and find the shape of his future predicted in the angle of her nose and the tilt of her head…
vs.
And at that point, for the first time, the urge to jiggle subsumed by a new need. A feeling unlike any he’d felt in his short, green existence. He needed TO KILL.
Haha – if only my lime green jello story had been written as well as yours! In particular, “his short, green existence” made me snort.
I love that you are still angry about it! Fuck forgiveness 😉
The nadir of my MFA workshopping came when two still-drunk (not hungover, still drunk. Like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall) spent 10 minutes haranguing me for using the word ‘belly’. It seems in their country (Scotland) using the word ‘belly’ to refer to a female character’s abdominal anatomy means she is, like, pregnant.
This is wonderful! And deadly accurate. Ive seen too many, endured some, maybe even wrote some. What do undergraduate women’s writings sound like? We need the companion piece, yes? Thanks for this! Looking forward to more.
Reading the whole series now and loving it!
Can we talk about how half this list applies to John Green, or
Huh. I guess it was just the Creative Writing class that I was in where everyone ended up writing about serial killers, then.
Seriously. Every single time there was a new round of stories to read in class, at least one of them was about serial killers. One time we read a story about a really awkward nervous shop teacher in high school who hits on a new colleague and invites him home, and we all said we liked it except that at the end it wasn’t really clear if they were having sex or if the protagonist was murdering his colleague.
Turns out it was murder.
When I read this I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I did a little of both. It’s been a long day.
All the serial killer stories sort of blend together, honestly. The memorable one was the story of a man reading backwards through his diary, while sobbing, while he went to mail it to his ex-girlfriend. It was a tedious sequence of drugs and sex and staring into each other’s eyes, and she had broken up with him by sending him a letter explaining how he was just too good for her but she’d always treasure their time together. After we’d soundly criticized that one–unlikable protagonist! unrealistic love interest! too much crying!–the writer said it was pretty much autobiographical.
Awkward.
But the serial killer ones? I honestly can’t remember any of them except for the “…so were they having sex, or was that murder?” one.
is there a mailing list for when you publish your book?
Sho nuff. Dead.
As a sometimes-writer, reading things like this gorgeous article make me glad that Monsieur Siniichulok is not a writer and has no desire to be one. Is that mean? I mean, he’s not like this, and of course not all men write like this–a distinct and well-loved minority of my favorite writers are men! For real! Even some kind of sexist ones like Charles Dickens and Fazil Iskander! But it seems like there’s so much encouragement and indulgence for writerly guys to be this particular brand of awful, and it makes my blood boil.
Love it, and also love that your project’s based on Ravenous.
Where do twee biographical notes fit in to all this?
I am the Magical Ethnic Person (TM).
I should start charging people.
There was that time, in an undergrad writing workshop, where a male classmate wrote a story about Russian Roulette, and a female character with my name got her brains blown out, graphically.
I didn’t think it was personal, but I was still incredibly disturbed.
THERE IS ALWAYS THAT GUY
FUCK THAT GUY
UGH
That is actually beautifully concise and much better than how I would like to reply to that sort of thing*.
*a single envelope with a box of matches inside and a small note reading "aggressively apply to face"
You’re at a laundromat that’s open 24 hours a day, and the only other person there is a perfect pixie girl. You make love to her with your eyes and your penis and think about all the pixie girls you never got to have sexy sex with. You never seem to say anything but you know each other’s history. Then you wake up and you never went to the laundromat, but you have the pixie girl’s number on your hand where she wrote it (in a scene that wasn’t mentioned before).
This article, this thread, I love them wholly, deeply, unconditionally–as I love my dog, or God. Outside, it starts to rain.
Have been preparing to apply for my MFA, now in my late thirties and mid-career. This just brought all the reservations back. And I’m not even a woman.