I'm Not Gonna, But I Don't Know, And I Will But Not Now

So I’m a little exhausted right now.  I could write a hundred more entries on cancer, but it wouldn’t actually help; there comes a point in every therapy where saying the same thing over and over digs deeper into the wound instead of cleaning it out.
And what I want to do right now is pick several overdue fights with the Men’s Rights Advocates, who descended on a couple of entries of mine, and pretty much confirmed what I thought about them.  Not all of them, of course.  There were a couple of lovely, thoughtful people who spoke up, making me realize that some of them are actually concerned with Men’s Rights without blaming women, and God bless them… but the rest of them?  Hoo.  But while I have the energy to dismantle some ludicrously brain-dead arguments these idiots proposed, I don’t have the energy to deal with the comments – a vital part of any functioning blog ecosystem.
Plus, I’m mad right now.  I don’t trust my instincts when I’m mad.  Picking a fight out of anger is usually not a good instinct.  And, as noted, there were a couple of gems hidden in the MRA discussions, and do I want to shit all over them right now because, quite frankly, the real bulk of my fury is at something I cannot touch?
No.  I do not.
That’s not the way I work.
Yet I don’t know what else to write about, as everything else feels dross.  I got copyedits on Flex.  That will be interesting.  I got some nice blurbs.  Also interesting.  But it’s hard to find anything interesting right now.
So hey.  You tell me something that’s interesting.  Give me something you just learned that fascinates you, for whatever reason.  I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to respond, but trust me: I’ll read it, and I’ll see it, and I’ll probably smile.
And thanks for supporting me in a dark time.  I saw how many of you went purple the other day, for Rebecca.  I tried to like and comment where I could, but then my phone ran out of energy, and then so did I.  I crashed so hard people wondered if I was having another heart attack.  (I wasn’t.)
But refill my energy, if you would, by sharing newness.  There is still growth in this world.  So tell me something new you learned, and I thank you.

The Surprisingly Complex Narrative Structure Of MasterChef

I’m in total love with MasterChef – it may be my favorite TV show, period.  It’s got that perfect balance for me between “presenting interesting, sympathetic characters” and “love of cooking,” as a bunch of amateur chefs struggle to cook up world-class dishes, with the usual elimination challenges to winnow out the contestants.
Hell’s Kitchen focuses on the stress of the kitchen, highlighting dysfunctional personalities and the arguments, and we hardly ever feel the joy of getting a dish just right.  MasterChef has its share of brutal takedowns, particularly when someone flubs a dish, but it also has a lot of kind mentoring in terms of praising the people who broke through this week.
(I suspect one of the reasons I find MasterChef so comforting is that it has a Clarion Workshop rhythm – we wrote a story every week, it got judged, and you either got lovingly eviscerated or cheered on by everyone.  Although, thankfully, nobody got voted out.)
But the interesting thing about MasterChef is that it’s got a really terrible beginning of the season to that ultimately works.  Which is to say that if you “improved” MasterChef, you’d actually break it.
Because when the season starts, there are eighteen people – and that’s just too damn many to focus on in an hour.  The first six to eight episodes of MasterChef consist a lot of “Wait, who’s that guy?” and “What had she done?”s, and folks get booted out that you had no emotional attachment to.  They do their best to assign easy-to-remember tags – here’s the fat jolly dude, here’s the ex-stripper, here’s the mouthy stay-at-home dad – but still, there’s a huge mass of people that you don’t actually know.
The easy “fix” would be to have fewer contestants – start with eight easily-recognizable archetypes and we’d remember them all very clearly.  But an interesting thing would happen:
We wouldn’t get attached to the contestants ourselves.
Part of the joy of MasterChef is seeing a welter of people every week, and eventually coming organically to your favorites.  It’s like picking a puppy out of the pile – you watch them all romping to and fro, and eventually one of them does something that grabs your attention, and then somehow that becomes “your” puppy.  Even though the chaos of the opening weeks is a little wearisome, it’s a necessary work on the viewer’s part – because once you’ve found your Luca or your Krissy, you feel an attachment you would not normally have.  So when they start getting eliminated (or, better, forge ahead to the next level), you are riveted.
Which just goes to show how fascinating narrative can be.  One of the maxims of fiction is that you want to let the reader do the work – you don’t tell them “She fell in love,” you show all the little signs of love and have them come to the conclusion for you, because if they make the connection then they’ll be that more attached to the outcome.
There’s a weird idea in fiction (and particularly TV) that you don’t want to have the reader work too hard or they’ll wander away… but the truth is that you don’t want the reader to not work, either.  When the reader does some of the heavy lifting to make their own judgments about what’s happening in your narrative, they are now personally invested in seeing if they’re correct.  They get drawn in more.  And so while on one level MasterChef’s convention chaos of “too many cooks” should spoil the broth, in reality it’s a tradeoff: you endure this confusion early on to arrive at truly heart-tugging challenges in the later episodes.
Which is a good lesson for writers: Yes, it’s okay to make things a little confusing.  You still have to make it entertaining – the moment-to-moment bits of MasterChef are palatable – but sometimes, the readers unknotting that confusion for themselves gives them a satisfaction they can’t get elsewhere. And with that satisfaction will come a burning need to know what comes next.

I Give You Permission To Suck

So I’m writing a delicate scene tonight – one between an eight-year-old with serious problems and her callous mentor trying to figure out what’s wrong.
And it’s one of those really tough scenes, because not only is nobody quite saying what’s on their mind, but the eight-year-old girl isn’t quite sure what her problems are.  And neither am I!  Because I am a gardener writer, who makes up shit as he goes along, I’m squinting at the page and discovering what’s wrong with this girl as she does.
It’s a tough job.  I’ve been writing this scene for three days, and only gotten 1500 words in.  (But it’s a critical scene, so that’s okay to take the time to get it right.  In the Save The Cat! parlance, this is the Theme Stated scene.)  And only today did I realize I had a fatal error:
The eight-year-old girl was talking like a fifteen-year-old kid.  Her dialogue was too worldly, her vocabulary too broad.  It didn’t ring true.
And I noted that and kept fucking going.
When I was a less-good writer, I would have seen that flaw as a full-stop flaw to fix ASAP.  I would have stopped to rewrite those clunky-sounding exchanges, and probably worked on some of the bad scene-blocking and descriptions, and polished shit that was unimportant.
The thing is, that fifteen-year-old dialogue was serving its purpose: it was getting me into the little girl’s head.  Maybe she was speaking beyond her years, but emotionally?  I was understanding who she was.  Maybe she was saying it in a way that wasn’t quite in character, but the problems she was expressing were honest and raw and perfect.
Going back to mop up some imperfect dialogue would have taken me out of this little girl’s head, and the rest of the scene would have been subtly wrong because I’d lost the thread of What is this little girl thinking? and some essential magic would have been lost.  Or worse, I would have polished a lot of dialogue to perfection, then discovered that it was the wrong dialogue, and had to delete it when I’d discovered that what she’d said sounded exactly like an eight-year-old but still wasn’t what this eight-year-old would have said.
As it is, what I have is a scene with good bones: the way this little girl evades questions, then quietly creeps up to admit her errors around the edges, is absolutely correct.  I had to write her like a fifteen-year-old to do this, and that’s great: that’s why it’s a draft.  It can suck.
Too many writers don’t get that.  Sometimes, capturing the vibrancy of a scene is more important than anything else you can do.  You often don’t know what a scene is really about until you finish it, and trying to repair something before you even know what’s wrong is in error.  You see that with the poor schmucks who’ve been writing and rewriting the first three chapters of their novel forever, never getting to the end, convinced that the novel can’t proceed until this opening is perfect.
But perfect for what?  Opening chapters only serve a function as part of a larger machine.  You don’t know what the opening chapters are really trying to do until you’ve written “THE END” and seen where all this is leading.  A novel is so complex and organic that you’ve got to let it breathe a little even if you’ve got the whole thing plotted from beginning to end.
Part of “It’s a draft, it can suck” involves knowing what you can fix in post.  I can fix dialogue that rings false.  I can fix a white-roomed scene without enough description.  I can fix flat prose.
What I can’t fix, at least not easily, is a scene where the characters aren’t reacting to each other organically, surprisingly, confrontationally.  For me, part of the reason I write well is that I know all the things I can not worry about now, and focus in on the scene aspects that need to click.  Once the characters are alive on the page, I can desuckify everything else housing those alive characters, make them pop.  That’s what the next draft is for.
And so I’ll speed through this novel, and finish it, knowing just how awful many aspects of this chapter are.  But I’ll get around to those.  The important part of the chapter, the muscle affixed to bone, is tight.  And that’s all I need.
 

The Cardinal Sin Of Comforting The Grieving

The one thing you must remember when comforting the grieving is this:
Tailor your message.
There’s not much you can say at this point that hasn’t already been said, and even if you did say something new it’s not going to help overmuch.   But there are things you can say that can highlight how unfair this all is, rub salt in fresh wounds by reminding them how people don’t get their pain.  So step carefully.
And when I say “step carefully,” that includes social media.  Remember, Facebook and Twitter are basically huge rooms that you’re shouting into where anyone can overhear you.  If you’ve friended a grieving person on Facebook, that means any post you make can be something you said, effectively, straight to their faces.  So yes, for a time, you must treat your Facebook as carefully as anything you’d say at the funeral home.
So don’t post things “at least he’s in Heaven now” when a grieving atheist is on your friends’ list.  That’s the opposite of comfort.
But also don’t be stupid and assume, “Well, one person doesn’t like religion, so all religious expressions must be bad!”  There are people to whom “At least he’s in Heaven now” would be a good thing to say.
The reason I bring this up is that a friend of mine went off on a vitriolic rant about how stupid it was to say “I’ve said a prayer for her” and went off on a huge rant about how what kind of fucked-up God would do this, and how could people be so insensitive to think that stupid prayers would be helpful, and even tagged me in the post so I’d see exactly what kind of morons would spew this crap.
But I am a Christian.  I do believe in God.  I don’t discuss my faith a whole lot, because I think at this point most sane adults have enough evidence to either believe in God or they don’t.  But my faith has really gotten me through this horrible time with a serenity I don’t think I could have had without it, and I’ve spent many hours in prayer at this point, talking with the Big Kahuna.
As such, it was really hurtful for me to see someone denigrating my faith in the middle of a time when I was deep in grief.
I’m sure she meant well.  But she committed the cardinal sin of comforting the grieving: she did not tailor the message.  She did the same asshole thing that religious nuts do in going, “Hey, I think this way, so I’m positive you think this way” and attempted to comfort me according to her script, not mine.
That didn’t help.
Yet while my belief is a balm to me, I make a point not to bring up God to anyone grieving unless I specifically know they do believe – and even then, I do so carefully.  Because even if someone actually believes the dead are in Heaven’s glory forevermore, that may not be particularly comforting to someone who is not in Heaven, and is very far from fucking Heaven, and in fact misses their loved one so much right now.  Heaven, if it exists, is very far away, and what they may need is a hug right now from someone who’s no longer there.
So until you know what a grieving person wants to hear, you should restrict your discussions to generics like “I’m sorry he’s gone” and “I’m sorry for your loss.”  It sounds trite to say this.  It is trite to say this.  But it is a true sentiment, and it’s not like there’s a sentence you can speak at this point that can magically erase someone’s grief over a death.  There may be specific conversations you have later about the loss and how it works, complex discussions organically molded to fit the shape of their pain… but that’s not going to happen in the first aftershock of death, and that’s when you’re likely to do the most damage.
Tailor the message.  Be careful on social media.  And be very specifically kind.
That’s about it.

I Welcomed You Into This World, And I Will Escort You Out

Six years ago, I stood in the Meyers’ house, holding tight to a secret.  We had been asked – no questions, please – to pick Carolyn up from school, and put Carolyn to bed, and wait for the Meyers to arrive.
Carolyn sat obediently in the back seat as we drove her home, bubbling with unasked questions.  Carolyn talks, pretty much all the time, but this time she didn’t.  She knew how adoptions work: they can fall apart at literally the last minute, if the mother changes her mind.  But as she went to bed, her excitement finally squirted out because she knew it was a sister, and we knew it was a sister, and nobody wanted to speak lest we break the spell.
We tried not to smile.  Because, yes, this was New Sister alert – the sister Carolyn had wanted for years.  But adoptions are hard, and harder still when you’ve already adopted one child, and full of disappointments.  More than once Eric and Kat had driven down and returned with nothing but tears.
Carolyn drifted off.  We sat in the living room, feet kicking, hoping for the new arrival.  Waiting.
And we heard the car pull into the driveway.
And we ran to the back door.
And we saw them lifting her triumphantly out of the back seat, so swaddled in fabric and car seat plastic that we didn’t even know her sex or the color of her skin was, but we raced to her, raced because we were so happy to see her, raced past a beaming Eric and Kat to welcome this new arrival:
Rebecca Alison Meyer.

“You were the first to see her in,” Kat said, still in shock from the diagnosis.  “Do you… do you want to be with her when she goes?”
Yes.
Yes, Rebecca.
I welcomed you into this world, and I will escort you out.
But oh, I was not ready to.

I have never been by anyone’s side while they passed on.  And I… I wasn’t sure if I could do this.  It is a terrifying idea, to watch someone you love die.  Would she go painfully, thrashing and seizing, like my stepfather Bruce?  Would she go slowly, taking weeks?  I had a job to do, eight hours a day of programming I owed them, a novel to write, how could I do that around her?
And… could I bear this?
I didn’t know if I had the strength.  I was afraid, a terrible fear, and maybe I’d committed to something I shouldn’t, but….
Then I thought of Rebecca.  Beautiful, stubborn, pain-in-the-ass Rebecca, and all those fears were incinerated.  I was her – well, I didn’t start as her godfather, it was a term sort of spot-welded to us because all the other terms didn’t convey to others how precious the Meyer children were to us.  I was a sort of erzatz-grandparent, forever taking joy in the Meyer kids, watching them grow, having them for overnights.  They were ours, and Rebecca was ours, and when I thought of her making that transition without Uncle Ferrett there I trembled with every kind of rage and injustice.
I would not leave her bedside.
I welcomed you here.
I will see you out.

I left her bedside, of course.  For short times.  You can’t wait vigil without practical elements: going to the bathroom, comforting visitors, fuelling up with caffeine and sugar because you’re running on two hours of sleep and you’re going to stay until it ends.
In the end, it was both short and long.  Thirteen hours I waited.  Most of that was parked in the couch across from her bed, watching, because Eric and Kat were the ones to hold her, making sure she was never alone.  But I too cuddled her; the Meyers were generous enough to meter out Rebecca’s last hours on Earth.  And I will not share those bedside details, though at least one thing happened in that time that rocked me to my core and made me question everything I knew about the universe.  One thing I am still processing.
But what happened in that room is not my story to tell.
Yet you know the ending: after hours of fighting, Rebecca finally passed on.  And she was not alone.  I’d say she was surrounded by everyone who loved her when she went, but that would have been impossible; we would have needed a stadium for that.  And her favorite Uncle Jim was, in a weekend of purest agony, attending his grandmother’s funeral in Chicago as his um-daughter died.  But Rebecca?  Was surrounded by the Greatest Hits package of love from a deep, deep catalog.
She was not alone.
But then again, a girl that special never had been.

And in the end, we watched the people come and bring her body out on a stretcher, and put it into the van, and they drove away.  I ran out into the center of the road to watch as the lights of the van went to the end of a long street, paused by the traffic light, and disappeared from view.  I had been the first face she saw coming out of that house; I would be the last.
Oh, Rebecca.  There were so many things I couldn’t do for you.  I couldn’t save you.  But this small thing was what I could do.  I stayed with you.  I guided you as best I could.
And though it was perhaps foolish to think that maybe you wanted me there, when you were surrounded by seas of people, I had made a vow.  The best kind of vow: one so big you’re not sure whether you can keep it.  I’d vowed that when that time came, Uncle Ferrett would be there.
And that was one final gift you gave me, little Rebecca: I had done things I was scared of before, maybe all of them, because though I walk bold inside I am a timid man.  But I had never understood the power of duty.  I knew that soldiers did leap out of trenches to face gunfire, I knew that duty gave them that strength to surpass mere human fears, but I had never experienced it.  But when I thought of you, Rebecca, when I imagined your life without that closure, that bookending, of me there and me there, I would not have faltered.  Had you taken months, I would have stayed.  Whatever you needed, no excuses, I would provide until my body broke and fell apart.
I saw you come.
I watched you go.
I hope it helped you.
I know it helped me.