DL3: Paperwork

The heat of summer made me sluggish and I missed my August update. Getting back into the revision mindset has been difficult, but I’ve overcome my natural inclination toward immobility in a few ways. Avoiding the work, first and foremost, to trick myself into approaching it from another angle. I finally put together a filing cabinet I ordered last year, unboxed immediately, and then let sit for six or seven months collecting dust. I sorted through a bulging, fractured plastic bin of paperwork accumulated across college and grad school. Once everything fell into labeled hanging folders, I pulled it back out again and read through the feedback I received across the years, making notes about nice things folks said alongside some great criticism that I never addressed or felt like I hadn’t fully addressed.

The result of that effort (still not completely finished, since it’s a fairly emotional process that I need breaks from) is continued appreciation for everyone that has read my writing and provided feedback, and a new appreciation for how the passage of time and accumulation of experience can change my perspective. It brought back a lot of memories: frustration of reading through feedback, agreeing with it, and being unable to implement meaningful changes, uncomfortable self-consciousness that accompanies any realization that I revealed something personal about myself to other people, overwhelming inadequacy and doubt about pouring more sad, white man fiction into the world, etcetera.

I took some breaks and let myself process. Tried to sweat and move my body around as much as possible. Reminded myself that I’m writing and engaging with the creative process for myself, and any potential future audience beyond myself is a wonderful notion, but preemptively creating an illusory mind audience that hates me probably isn’t very helpful.

I worked through and discarded the idea that revision is an additive process where I layer something new on top of something old and the result is better. As I thought about the side story, “Matches” and what I tried to communicate with it during grad school, and what I want to communicate with it now from a new perspective and within a new context, slowly it sunk in that I might have to break a few bones. Heck, I might have to pull out the whole skeleton and start threading broken broom handles through the tattered skin before any real muscle could latch on.

These thoughts were supported by the feedback I received, which included a lot of encouragement to dig deeper. For “Matches” specifically, an opportunity to pull forward the “retrospective” part first person narration more (or at all beyond the opening words), requests to explore aspects of the story that are only hinted at, and of course numerous suggestions to help clarify & strengthen the language. There is a lot of commonality across the feedback for all of my writing, and it all points toward a developing writer attempting to explore emotionally immediate subject matter in fiction that they lacked the tools and willpower to explore in their own life. So a lot of “hinting” and a desperate hope that someone else would connect all the dots and do the work, if I’m being unflattering. Reading it now, I see how I tried to strip down and distill a storyline, trying to get the narrative skeleton to at least sit upright, but everything feels thin. There’s a hesitancy throughout, driven by a refusal to put space between my actual life / family and the storytelling / characters that could re-contextualize, clarify, and lead to personal and narrative growth because that’s a scary and revealing gap to jump across when you can’t even see the other side. How can I write about my flaws when those flaws have got me tied up in the basement.

So for this update, I thought about “Matches”. Within its current context in Plenum the Twine game, the story is the first time the narrator changes, introducing Aaron (Thomas and Bill’s father) as a viewpoint character after his introduction in the previous side story, “Jigsaw,” as a father and a son struggling with his mother’s decline in health and his own mental health issues. Aaron and Jake parallel Thomas and Bill, older brothers struggling to understand younger brothers, trying to fill a role of responsibility and mentorship without any confidence they’re fit for the job. The boys’ home life drives them from their house, bullies and a lack of social skills drive them from their peers, and a growing divide between the brothers is threatening to drive them apart as well, isolating Aaron as he helplessly watches Jake go through changes he has no frame of reference for.

The player can influence Aaron’s response to the fear of losing his brother by hiding or revealing Jake’s behavior to their parents at one juncture, and whether Aaron takes control of an encounter with bullies or lets Jake’s anger resolve the situation. I will likely add a final choice to take responsibility for the fire and the results of the fight or place the blame on Jake, and the accumulated choices will affect their relationship in stories to come, as well as how Thomas envisions his relationship with Bill in the trunk story. It’s messy right now, but pushing in the right direction.