Read Time: 04:04
The names alone are unforgivable: Sierra and Orion. I don’t think I named them ironically, or to incite hatred of the nature-loving 1%.
But who names their kids Sierra and Orion? Bloggers. That’s who.
This first story, a typical suburban bore, features two annoying children, Sierra and Orion. The opening line, “She slices the apple with haste,” makes me want to start a bonfire (with extra lighter fluid) and burn every first sentence I’ve ever written like that. That, or I should send a condolence card to anyone who read the story saying, “I’m sorry for your loss: I know that time and attention are things you can never get back.”
The “story” has a “plot” which consists of the children being so annoying that the mother hops a flight to Florence—a place that, in her youth, she shared with a lover.
Was this my younger self projecting that I would want to breed, and then apply nature-based naming conventions to my offspring?
Or was this the inexperienced writer’s way of not being able to say the more interesting or more true thing? That my mother, and maybe many mothers, would have been much happier without children.
***
I’ve already admitted to some very lame naming conventions, but it gets worse, and linguistically, more complicated.
I am author to a disappointing spate of stories whose central characters have names like Whoever (naming one who is a lover, unrequited), What (naming one who is an object of affection), and Yes (naming a female, and notably, also a word which does not neatly fit into the eight categories of conventional parts-of-speech).
Of course, I’m Yes.
Having created such characters, I know, is a thing worthy of a few therapy sessions. (I blame e.e. cummings.)
One particular story’s protagonist, the aforementioned Yes, is a character who works in the “Ministry of Words.” (I blame Monty Python.) The story is about a woman who feels isolated, disenfranchised, though her job is to keep tabulation of the word “with” for the Ministry. She meets a man named What.
And that’s the story. That’s it.
What does this mean? Realistically, we can only deduce that I was working a shitty corporate job at the time. But I can also testify—because I’ve travelled the ring of literary hell that is reading this story—I can also testify that if language is a currency, I am the ultimate profligate.
The names are one thing, but I also over-worked my license with diction. Bulky, awkward, unnatural and just gross: the diction is a fat person exercising. Phrases like “discomfortable reality emblazoned hot her cheeks red.” Or even, “Yes and What intoed the elevator together.”
My only defense in having written phrases like this is: Goddamn you all, proofreaders, poets and professors alike, for failing to get me to leave the poetry at the coffeeshop. (In the end, I blame you all.)
There was a time when I could imagine worlds of words, structures of which no one ever properly learned (for technically they are improper), but surely you got the feel. And this is beautiful when it fits, when it works.
But there are also times when you need someone to tell you that you sound like a complete asshole because you wasted readers’ attention in describing elevator doors which “nonchalantly close.”
The only salvageable piece from this story (aside from its ending) is the dialogue. Yes and What, when they meet for the first time, echo an obvious theme from a favorite, old-timey comedy routine:
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
And they had met.
Abstractions are powerful because they clarify complexity by ignoring specifics. And this is what the story is about. The names ignore specifics. The plot is unspecific (fucking snooze). And the author ignored her own specifics when writing the story, too.
The story was terrible, yes. The environment in which the story was written (the real-life relationship) was also terrible. And neither had been specifically acknowledged. Life imitating art imitating life imitating art…
When I wrote the drivel about Yes and What, we’d been together about a decade, but already acted very much apart. He accused me of having one foot out the door for years. I looked around, cited the home and the family and the business and made a performance-based argument against his accusation. Still, he sensed I wanted to be free of it, and he wasn’t wrong.
Did I not understand “with,” or was I just opposed to it with him? I couldn’t be sure, so I wrote a shitty abstract story about none of it, and all of it, without addressing any of it.
Whichever story you’re following at this point, the abstraction or the “real” one, it almost doesn’t matter—neither are worth remembering. But still, there was some good dialogue in there, in both stories, on both sides.
And I stand by the last line. I do. I stand by its ringing truth. It almost doesn’t matter which story was told before it. It’s just a perfect last line.
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