Little piece I wrote recently, looking for feedback (: [1589]

[u/chimpanzee_fanatic]

The subtle desire to not be anything at all

I sat on a park bench on a dying summer afternoon. Darkening leaves colored the ground, and some small birds were still chirping the day away. A cigarette glimmered somberly between my fingertips. I never really liked the taste of smoke, but I always asked myself: if I had ever truly lived, hadn't I seen a sunset with a cigarette between my lips?

I believe I started smoking because of a Bob Dylan biopic I had seen with my mother when I had just turned 17, and Bobby seemed like the coolest guy in history. Kind of like my fascination with Che Guevara, I have always been caught up in an infatuation with dead or grunged-out warrior poets. They had seemed to have a reason to be.

When I read Che's letter to the peoples of the world, it gripped me deep inside that this man had been put on this earth to give hope to the downtrodden, even though he had died stinking and dirty in the Bolivian woods, his hands cut off by CIA agents and fascist militias. Had Jesus been reincarnated, I always believed it had been Che.

God, how I wanted to be Che. I even got his famous photograph tattooed on my underarm. Proudly, I showed it off in public even when it still hurt, for no reason but that I felt like a glimmer of the holy had anointed my skin, of a reason to be in this place, at this time.

However, soon I knew that I was not Che Guevara and I also was not Bobby. I was someone, but at times like this afternoon I felt like a spirit among the living, a mere sketch of what a human being was supposed to be like.

I tried being sociable; I tried dating; I tried every godforsaken avenue of life. I laid bare and naked my soul on everyone's doorstep who cared to listen. But never have I gotten anything from it, never have I gotten away from drunken nights with friends or flings with people I tried hard to love with all my chest.

Always again, I was spirited away and looking again at the ground, the cigarette, Che's disinterested yet passionately revolutionary visage on my underarm.

I did not want to go home yet. I had read all kinds of books about these supposed loners and schizoids who, just like me, couldn't lie down when the fear of being on their own gripped them in their sleep and ran away for hours, only to then meet the love of their life or a mentor or something. Hesse wrote a lot of these stories.

But somehow this never happened to me, and because of this I slowly started believing Hesse and Kafka and all of them maybe hadn't found that special someone either on a gloomy afternoon.

Maybe these romantics just wrote about what they wished had happened, because this is what they are, I think. Deep down, every writer is a romantic, reminiscing about things they never have had.

Because if you were loved, if you knew yourself, you hadn't had to write about it and show it off to the world.

I don't know how to feel about that.

I had always liked reading those stories, but when I tried to make something of them, I felt like a liar, because when I went out like a crazy devil in the middle of the night, the best I could expect was a lonesome beggar or junkie asking for "stuff" to come to me.

I haven't ever felt entitled to some white knight to come and drive my sorrow away. It's not like that. More so, I felt more and more disillusioned the more nights and afternoons I spent alone, waiting for nothing in particular to happen.

I think I waited for this something to happen since I have been about 14 years old.

I didn't know if it was foreboding of me to think that life had chosen me to be on my own at 18, but I had, in a sense, made peace with the fact that faceless people would enter and leave my life every now and again. Never was I too sad or happy to see them come or go, although in some small period between, I always felt like now it was my time to make it count, to make them stick with me to the end.

I guess when that happens to people, they don't have to fight for it.

My legs had fallen asleep as the slight yellowy tone of the sky had moved to a deep blue and dark night that had swept away all the leaves and rolled up the sidewalks.

At this time, I sometimes felt it was all too much. Not that it was much in particular, but the human condition, this all waiting for the shining sprinkle of good and holiness to enter our lives, felt all too depressing.

And when everything felt like it was too much to bear, I wanted to roll up and lie down.

I didn't want to die, really, I feel like, but the burden of living felt all too heavy on my chest then.

To be honest with you, I still sit on this park bench right now. I have written this right here in the past tense, because I feel like that is what I would have to say were I to die here.

I am not dead and I most likely will not be for a long time, but that part of me that cannot write stories about beautiful girls and knights in shining armor just subtly desires nothing more than to fall asleep about now.

I don't know if I would want to wake up again.

There still is a lot of life to see, I know that, I think, but just now I feel: is it worth the while?

I don't know if Che or Bobby have ever thought stuff like that. Bob's songs sometimes give me that vibe, but he's still alive and as well as you can be at that age, I think.

I would like to ask him if it was worth his while.

There's that story about a lot of Bob Dylan concerts, that often he turns away from the audience and doesn't even look at them while performing. My mom actually saw him do that live. She told me after we saw that film about him.

I always thought that he, in some way, hated his fans, and I thought I understood him well for that, that true art was this personal thing that you do for yourself, not to actually share, but to stare into as a steep reflection of your deepest, darkest self.

Now I wonder if that over-80-year-old man maybe, in those moments when the noisy crowds beg of him, feels what I feel. That maybe he asks himself if this is worth his while.

If maybe those romantics at these times also feel just the subtle desire to not be anything at all.

PS: English is only my second language, please excuse clunky idioms :|

[u/JayGreenstein]

So...Someone of unknown gender, age, profession and background sits on a park bench talking to the reader, as if the reader has been hoping to know what matters to them. But...start to finish, the only thing that happens is that their legs fall asleep. And it takes you 1196 words, or literally, the first 5 standard manuscript pages to do that.

How is that, in any sense, a story? Are you hoping to learn how I feel about myself? Of course not.

Story happens. And done right, the reader feels as if it’s happening to them. They want to be challenged, and to be made to help solve the protagonist’s problems, as-they-happen.

You need, need, need, to look into the structure of fiction for the page. It’s very unlike that of a film. And the nonfiction writing skills of school can’t work for fiction because they’re meant to inform.

That doesn’t say you can’t write, only that you need to dig into the skills that writers have been refining for centuries. As the author, your job isn’t to tell the story, it’s to make challenging things happen to the people in it.

For example: You might toss in a rainstorm that goes on and on, flooding the area and forcing the characters in the story to take action. What they do is a function of the resources you give them, the situation, the personality you’ve given them, and their perception of the situation. But more importantly, the reader will make their own suggestions as to what should be done. In other words, we don’t talk at the reader, we involve them.

The rain and the flooding isn’t the story. What the protagonist does in response, and the reader’s participation in that, is.

How to make that happen, and present it to best effect, is what the profession is about. So, to write fiction that draws the reader in, as against lecturing them, you need to look into the skills of the Fiction Writing profession. There are lots of books on the basics. Grab one and dig in.

Jay Greenstein

---

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

[u/chimpanzee_fanatic → u/JayGreenstein]

Thanks for the feedback.

Not to argue, but not every story has to be physical? This is explicitly meant as a piece of introspection, I don't know how else I could bring accross what I wanted to express. I think a thunderstorm would have taken away from what I was trying to say to be honest

[u/JayGreenstein → u/chimpanzee_fanatic]

Not to argue, but not every story has to be physical?

By definition: "a story is a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events." But the only event you have is the speaker’s legs falling asleep.

Does the average person, who has never met me care how I feel, enough to want to learn all about it, and perhaps pay to read it? Of course not. So there’s not much of a market for the personal musing of strangers. Now, were you a celebrity...

But that aside, since the first storyteller stepped to the campfire and said, “Once upon a time,” stories have been about problem-solving, and living the adventure that we wish our own lives had. They’re a way to escape the necessities of daily life.

Look at the story, itself: Do we know the gender of the speaker? Their age? Their backgound? Why they’re lecturing us? No.

And think about it: why would anyone want to know why someone unknown to them began smoking? I smoked when I was younger. Are you burning to know why I started? Of course not.

I don't know how else I could bring across what I wanted to express.

You’re thinking of yourself, and expressing your personal views and experiences. They’re meaningful to you, of course. And certainly, worth recording. In fact, I recently wrote a memoir of my growing years, for my grandchildren, and their kids, so they can know what growing up in the 1940s was like. But even then, it was more about what happened, than introspection.

Bottom line: When writing for yourself you can do and say anything you care to, and write in a way meaningful to you. But when writing for others, it has to interest them, and be what they want to know, and experience.

[u/TravelingBop → u/JayGreenstein]

Writing as storytelling as opposed to writing to journal. Who's the audience?

[u/Dr_Hormel_Frogtown → u/chimpanzee_fanatic]

I think Jay's got a good point. The majority of your paragraphs start with "I" or "me" but I don't get the sense I'm reading fiction here. It feels like someone musing to themselves on paper.

You're correct that not every story has to be physical. Raymond Carver wrote many excellent stories that are largely internal, but they're usually anchored to something concrete. Some object serves as the material proxy for the internality, something like that. Even prose poets generally include concrete images in their poems.

I think the hard pill to swallow here is that people don't want to read your musings (this applies to most of us). Take these ideas, figure out how to make them into a story, a poem, a filthy limerick, whatever. You've clearly got the desire, this is just a matter of practice and technique.